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ESSAYS AND STUDIES 

IN HONOR OF 

MARGARET BARCLAY WILSON 



COLUMBIA imiVERSITY PRESS 

Columbia University 
New York 

SALES AGENTS 

London 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 

Amen Corner, E.C. 

Shanghai 

EDWARD EVANS & SONS, Ltd. 

30 North Szechuen Road 





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ESSAYS AND STUDIES 

IN HONOR OF 

MARGARET BARCLAY WILSON 

TEACHER PHYSICIAN LIBRARIAN AUTHOR 




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1922 
All rights reserved 



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Copyright^ ig22 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type. Published October, 1922 



THE PLIMPTON PRESS 
NORWOOD • MASS • U • S • A 



OCT 18 1922 

ICI.A690191 



TO 

MARGARET BARCLAY WILSON, A.B., M.Sc, M.D. 

IN COMMEMORATION OP THE TfflRTY-FIFTH YEAR 

OF HER OFFiaAL CONNECTION WITH 

HUNTER COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK 

TUTOR 1 887-1 893 

INSTRUCTOR 1893-1904 

ASSOaATE PROFESSOR 1904-191O 

PROFESSOR 1910- 

HONORARY LIBRARIAN 1915- 

TmS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 

AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION, GRATITUDE, AND ESTEEM 

BY HER PUPILS AND FRIENDS 

OCTOBER 6, 1887 — OCTOBER 6, I922 



SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS xi 



Herbert E. Gregory, 

Honolulu, Hawaii 
RosiNE N. Haas, New York City 
Helen L. Haese, New York City 
Alfred Hafner, New York City 
Grace C. Halpin, New York City 
Arthur Arton Hamerschlag, 

Pittsburgh, Pa. 
Elizabeth S. Harris, 

Brooklyn, N. Y. 
K. Louise Hartt, New York City 
Winifred Hathaway, New York City 
Cecelia C. Haviland, 

New York City 
Samuel B. Heckman, New York City 
•Emma Herdling, New York City 
Amelia C. Herschmann, 

New York City 
Elma M. Herz, New York City 
Dorothea C. Hess, New York City 
W. Hodge, Morgantown, West Va. 
Calm Morrison Hoke, 

Palisade, N. J. 
W. J. Holland, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
Nahmy E. Homsy, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Camille Finiel Ho wells, 

New York City 
Emma D. Huebner, New York City 
Ernest C. Hunt, New York City 
Hunter College Library, 

New York City 
M. Louise Hutchinson, 

Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Illinois State Library, 

Springfield, 111. 
Stanley M. Isaacs, New York City 
Hannah S. Jablonower, 

New York City 
Mary Belden James, New York City 
Josephine M. Jandell, DeKalb, 111. 
Elizabeth Jarrett, New York City 
Robert Underwood Johnson, 

New York City 
Carl F. Kayser, New York City 
Martha M. Kennerly, 

New York City 



Florence Dorning Kirschner, 

New York City 
Sara Kivelson, New York City 
Paul Klapper, New York City 
Emma A. Klauser, New York City 
Margaret EInox, New York City 
Grace H. Kupfer, New York City 
Lillian Kupfer, New York City 
Sally E. Kutz, New York City 
Helen P. Langner, Milford, Conn. 
J. WiLMER Latimer, 

Chevy Chase, Md. 
Grace Lawlor, New York City 
Mrs. Brooks Leavitt, 

New York City 
Hortense Lebenstein, 

New York City 
Joseph Lebenstein, New York City 
Anna C. Lee, Lynbrook, L. I. 
Olga Lurle Lehman, New York City 
Maria R. Leonard, 

Tarrytown, N. Y. 
Alma Mendes Levine, 

New Rochelle, N. Y. 
Charlotte Leviton, New York City 
Celia Levy, New York City 
RosEL F. Levy, New York City 
Rose Lighterman, New York City 
GusTAV LiNDENTHAL, New York City 
Ethel Liplich, New York City 
Jane C. Lloyd, New York City 
Shirley S. Lloyd, New York City 
Elizabeth Vera Loeb, 

New York City 
Harriet L. Loewenstein, 

New York City 
Risa Lowie, New York City 
Robert H. Lowie, Berkeley, Cal. 
Stephen Bleecker Luce, 

Boston, Mass. 
Mrs. Clayton R. Lusk, 

Cortland, N. Y. 
Graham Lusk, New York City 
Emily H. Luth, New York City 
Anna M. LIjtkenhaus, 

New York City 



xii SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS 



Jack A. Lutkenhaus, 

New York City 
Gladys T. Lynch, New York City 
John J. Lynch, New York City 
Mary I. McDonald, 

New York City 
Robert A. F. McDonald, 

Lewiston, Maine 
Honora McDonough, 

New York City 
Mary C. McGuire, New York City 
EIate McKee, Brooklyn, N. Y, 
Ella C. McNaier, New York City 
Mary G. McNamee, Woodmere, L. I. 
Edward C. McParlan, 

New York City 
Evelyn A. McPherson, 

Westwood, N. J. 
Frances E. McRae, New York City 
Mary E. Magrane, New York City 
Miriam Mahler, New York City 
Jeannette W. Malloy, 

New York City 
Edna J. Malone, New York City 
Louise Martinengo, New York City 
Victor Martinengo, New York City 
Elizabeth Mathews, Waterville, Me. 
Katherine B. Mattison, 

New York City 
Jennie E. Mawson, New York City 
Henriette Mayer, New York City 
Mrs. Louis Mayer, New York City 
Aline M. Meyer, New York City 
Julie A. Meyers, New York City 
S. E. Mezes, New York City 
Mrs. Maynard M. Miller, 

New York City 
Minneapolis Athenaeum, 

Minneapolis, Minn. 
Esther Mintz, New York City 
Herbert R. Moody, New York City 
Charles J. Moore, New York City 
Agnes L. Morrow, New York City 
Maria McCullough Morrow, 

New York City 
C. Robert Moulton, Columbia, Mo. 



Ilse Mueller, New York City 
Rosemary F. Mullen, 

New York City 
Edith Musgrave, New York City 
Emily Nathan, New York City 
Mrs. Henry Necarsulmer, 

New York City 
New York Public Library, 

New York City 
H. H. NoYES, New York City 
Helen G. O'Connor, New York City 
Agnes M. O'Donnell, 

New York City 
William H. Park, New York City 
Dorcas M. Perkins, New York City 
Mrs. James Picker, 

New Rochelle, N. Y. 
Bertha A. Plundeke, 

New York City 
Adelaide Friedlander Podoll, 

New York City 
Cecelia Pois, New York City 
Mrs. William C. Popper, 

New York City 
Robert G. Powers, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
John A. Poynton, New York City 
Henrietta Prentiss, New York City 
Miriam Sutro Price, 

New York City 
Bertha Richman Proskauer, 

New Rochelle, N. Y. 
Public Library, Detroit, Mich. 
Public Library, Lawrence, Mass. 
Herbert Quick, 

Berkeley Springs, W. Va. 
Isabel M. Ramsgate, 

New York City 
Mabel Fitz Randolph, 

New York City 
Charles A. L. Reed, Cincinnati, Ohio 
Amy Remey, New York City 
Emma M. Requa, New York City 
M. Augusta Requa, New York City 
Rose Riccobono, New York City 
Alfred W. Richardson, 

New York City 



SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS xiii 



Mabel M. Ritti, New York City 
Gertrude Roberts, New York City 
Frederick B. Robinson, 

New York City 
Alma Hoykendorf Rogers, 

Pittsford, Vermont 
Mary Swartz Rose, New York City 
John Ross, Dunfermline, Scotland 
Caroline Baer Rothenberg, 

Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Muriel A. Ruddy, New York City 
Frances Saneord, New York City 
Marie L. Sanial, Northport, L. I. 
Elsie Sarchi, New York City 
Rebecca Schenck, New York City 
Emily Hyams Schlesinger, 

Yonkers, N. Y. 
Ruth Schlesinger, Yonkers, N. Y. 
Gladys Schreiber, New York City 
Cornelia Schwartz, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Bessie Schwimmer, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Miriam Wood Scott, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
SopmE Moeller Seringhaus, 

New York City 
H. C. Sherman, New York City 
Mrs. John R. Sim, New York City 
Lao G. Simons, New York City 
Julia Simpson, New York City 
Kathryn M. Sletmeyer, 

New York City 
Anna V. Smith, Elmhurst, L. I. 
Esther L. Smith, New York City 
Lillian M. Snow, New York City 
Florence M. Sommerich, 

Far Rockaway, L. L 
Bethel Spencer, New York City 
Mary Finkelstein Spiegel, 

New York City 
Lucy Stark, New York City 
Sydney Doris Stavinsky, 

Brooklyn, N. Y. 
G. E. Stechert & Co., 

New York City 
Eda Steinach, New York City 
Irene Stewart, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
Thomas A. Storey, New York City 



Yetta Styer, New York City 
Allene R. Swain, New York City 
Emma Sylvester, New York City 
Helen H. Tanzer, New York City 
Esther Taub, New York City 
Alonzo E. Taylor, 

Stanford, Univ. Cal. 
Enid F. Thorpe, New York City 
R, H. TiERNEY, New York City 
Gertrude L. Todd, 

Palisades Park, N. J. 
Emily Topp, New York City 
Mary E. Trihey, New York City 
Rose E. Tunney, New York City 
University of Pittsburgh Library, 

Pittsburgh, Pa. 
University of Rochester Library, 
Rochester, N. Y. 
University of Texas Library, 

Austin, Texas 
Frida von UzsrwERTH, New York City 
Margaret Van deCop, 

Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Kate Van Wagenen, New York City 
Adelaide B. Ventres, New York City 
Elsie R. Viault, New York City 
Evelyn Walker, New York City 
Florence T. Walters, 

New York City 
Caroline E. Ward, New York City 
Dora Watnick, New York City 
Louisa M. Webster, New York City 
Amelia Weingart, New York City 
Miriam Werner, New York City 
Wesleyan University Library, 

Middletown, Conn. 
Andrew F. West, Princeton, N. J. 
Clara Linforth West, 

Boston, Mass. 
George M. Whicher, New York City 
Bernice White, New York City 
Cornelia F. White, New York City 
Donald G. Whiteside, 

New York City 
Marie T. Widmayer, New York City 
Elin Wikander, New York City 



xiv SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS 



Kathe Wuckens, New York City 
William G. Willcox, 

West New Brighton, 
Staten Island, N. Y. 
Blanche Colton Williams, 

New York City 
Talcott Williams, New York City 
Dorothy L. Williamson, 

New York City 



Frank D. Wilsey, New York City 
Miriam Wilson, New York City 
Katherine Winterburn, 

New York City 
Olive Woodall, New York City 
R. S. Wood worth, New York City 
Mary L. Wright, New York City 
William H. Yale, New York City 
Mrs. M. S. Zenker, New York City 



ESSAYS AND STUDIES 

IN HONOR OF 

MARGARET BARCLAY WILSON 

CHARACTER AND EDUCATION 

THERE is a greater thing than book knowledge in the 
college curriculum. 

We are marking an anniversary of thirty-five years of 
continuous service in that most beautiful occupation, — 
guiding the mind of youth. 

It is not a tribute to " an unknown soldier," — " whose 
very name," as our President so finely said at the burial 
in Arlington, " whose very name took flight with his im- 
mortal soul," — but it is to one who is very much alive. 

Students learn reverence for man and his methods 
from their teachers. Writing has some effect on careers, 
but example and personal contact with a teacher have 
more to do with development of character through emu- 
lation. It is the character, bearing and deportment of 
the teacher, the dignified presentation of truths and facts, 
the charm of personality, that is remembered when book 
knowledge has faded. A teacher who does not assume 
absolute knowledge, but sympathizes with the student 
in her short-comings, has most respect from the scholar. 



2 ROBERT ABBE 

The Egyptians say, " Be not proud of your learning; 
there's always more to learn." Many half-prepared 
teachers pose to their classes as if they would be thought 
gods, and would have the scholar look up to them as if 
to say, with Epictetus, " Nothing is unknown to the gods." 
Not so the self-effacing teacher whom we honor. 

A career is notable, not by how it was begun, but by 
how it was finished. Careers are the result of opportu- 
nity. Vision and opportunity make them. " Many have 
vision, and small opportunity. Many have opportunity, 
and dull vision." Occasionally one arrives. We are less 
interested in how our friend arrived at her distinction, 
than in the fact of her constant use of her native powers 
and responsibilities. 

Habits of intensive and continuous work are proof of 
character. Such proof is given in the beautiful life of 
our revered President Eliot of Harvard, still active at 
eighty-eight years. Useful workmen in God's beautiful 
world are like burning Roman candles, incessantly 
giving out myriads of scintillations. And every once in 
a while a vivid ball of fire shoots out, — these are anniver- 
saries. 

Teaching easily becomes an established habit. John 
La Farge said, " when we are young, things merely hap- 
pen, they don't come by any sequence." After middle 
life, careers are made. " Like the cat princess, who, dur- 
ing her public life killed mice for a living, when she re- 
tired to private life kept killing them for fun." 

Pasteur, after reading Smiles' " Self-help," said he 
agreed with the Englishman, that " the supremacy of a 



CHARACTER AND EDUCATION 3 

nation resides in the sum total of private virtues, activi- 
ties and energies." 

So we count the works of the teacher of whom we write. 

There's a greater thing than book knowledge in a col- 
lege curriculum. 

Robert Abbe 



THE AMERICAN COAL-TAR CHEMICAL 
INDUSTRY 

BEFORE the World War, the American coal-tar chem- 
ical industry was practically non-existent. Notwith- 
standing that the manufacture of coal-tar colors in the 
United States had been in existence nearly forty years, 
there were, in 19 14, but seven small dye-manufacturing 
plants in the whole country. The American manufacture 
was confined almost entirely to the " assembling '^ into 
finished dyes of coal-tar intermediates imported from 
Europe, chiefly from Germany. 

Contrast this dismal picture of national dependence 
with the status quo in 1920. The total number of firms 
engaged in the production of coal-tar products in 1920 
was 213, while those engaged in the manufacture of dyes 
alone numbered 82. Three hundred and sixty separate 
dyes were being manufactured in 1920. Of these, 108 
dyes, the output of which represented more than 90 per 
cent of the total production, were each manufactured by 
three or more firms. Thirty-five dyes representing over 
one half of the total quantity produced were each manu- 
factured by seven or more firms. 

Thus it is obvious that during the last seven years 
the United States has built up a dye and coal-tar chem- 
ical industry which, considering the short time, is an 
American industrial achievement of the first order. In 



AMERICAN COAL-TAR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 5 

fact, it is an industrial achievement unparalleled in the 
whole of recorded history. Every true American, with 
the welfare of his country at heart, can take just pride 
in so remarkable an accomplishment. 

So it may be said with truth that the American coal- 
tar chemical industry owes its being to the World War. 
When the efficiency of the British Navy effectually pre- 
vented German dyes from reaching our shores, American 
men of business and American men of science got to- 
gether, raised the necessary capital, researched, devel- 
oped, produced, improved their efficiencies, sold their 
goods and placed America where it belonged economically 
— free and independent. 

Let us repeat. To-day America has eighty-two in- 
dependent dye plants in eighteen states. We have 213 
coal-tar chemical plants in 23 states. An understanding 
of the significance of this industry to the country as a 
whole necessitates that we review some elementary facts. 

The story of the treasures hidden in a lump of coal has 
often been told. We all know that coke, gas, ammonia, 
and coal-tar are the primary products of coal distillation. 
The fascinating potentialities of the black sticky mess 
called coal-tar are also generally known. From this 
source, the chemist has wrested the most delicate per- 
fumes, the most exquisite flavors, aH the colors of the rain- 
bow, explosives, poison gases, tanning materials, resinous 
compounds like bakelite, solvents, rubber accelerators, 
photographic developers, paints, roofing materials, road 
binders, disinfectants, motor spirits, and drugs to soothe 
and heal the sick. 



6 F. E. BREITHUT 

The United States has the largest coal deposits in the 
world. Nature's lavish liberality in providing us with 
this basic raw material led us to squander it with the 
ruthless recklessness of a spendthrift. Before the World 
War, the greater part of our coke was made in the waste- 
ful beehive ovens. In the quarter century preceding the 
World War, we threw away in tar and gas, reduced to 
coal equivalent, an amount equal to over 300,000,000 tons 
of coal, over $400,000,000 worth of ammonia, and over 
$500,000,000 worth of benzol products. 

The demands of war electrified us into sane action, with 
the result that 60 per cent of the coke produced in the 
United States in 1920 was made in by-product ovens, 
thereby conserving, for the use of the industries just 
enumerated, ample quantities of the raw materials needed 
for the making of dyes, drugs, flavors, perfumes, and 
the other kindred final products of the coal-tar chemical 
industry. 

Notwithstanding our great natural wealth in coal, the 
United States was slow to develop a coal-tar chemical in- 
dustry. It is needless to dwell on the reasons for this. 
Aside from our own lack of interest, certainly the largest 
single factor was the German determination to dominate 
this field of industrial activity at any cost. 

Then came the World War. And with it came the 
staggering realization that we Americans, with all our 
natural resources and industrial wealth, were impotent to 
prosecute war because, above all things, we lacked a coal- 
tar chemical industry. The German dye plants were in- 
deed " potential arsenals " which they rapidly energized 



AMERICAN COAL-TAR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 7 

into explosive factories and poison gas plants. But we 
Americans had neither plants nor tools, equipment nor 
experienced men. For a brief time, we groped in helpless- 
ness to build up in months what should have taken decades 
of daily thinking and effort. 

How this chaotic situation was met is such recent his- 
tory and the record is so plain that it is needless to re- 
peat it. American chemists and engineers plunged into 
the solution of the problem with such energy and ability 
that eighteen months of concentrated effort found us 
ready to face the foe. Just as we reached a point at which 
we could hurl back at the enemy the terribly effective 
means of offense which he had thrown at us, the war 
ended. 

We had lost much. But we had gained one thing of in- 
estimable value. We had here in our own United States 
the beginning of a dye industry. 

As these lines are being written, the United States 
Senate is debating the proper legislation to protect the 
American coal-tar chemical industry. We are now oper- 
ating under a limited embargo which has worked with 
fair satisfaction for several years. Shall this system be 
continued or shall some other method be applied. Or 
shall we give up what we have gained entirely? Ridicu- 
lous as it may sound, the last named alternative is seri- 
ously advanced by seemingly thoughtful men and women. 
Why — ? Because the existence of a coal-tar chemical 
industry means the ability to wage chemical warfare. 
You do not get the argument? Neither do I, but some 
people seem to. 



8 F. E. BREITHUT 

For chemical warfare is here to stay. You cannot 
legislate it out of existence. Any chemist can go into his 
garage, or his apartment kitchen, or his back lot, and ex- 
periment with chemicals which may yield poison gases. 

We must have chemists, we must have chemicals and 
we must have inquiring human minds. And if we have 
chemicals and chemists and inquiring human minds — 
then we have potential war gases. 

When all reasoning, argument, persuasion and rational 
attempts at solving international difficulties have failed, 
and two nations face each other, each with the desire 
to impose its will on the other, the result is warfare, and 
in waging war we may as well face the realities as they 
exist. These realities are that each side desires to kill 
and maim as many of the enemy as possible. 

Certainly no sane man could accuse these United States 
of ours of a desire to dominate the world militaristically. 
All sane men and women hate war, Americans more than 
any others, probably. The costs of war are intolerable. 
The costs of preparation for war are equally intolerable. 

We all want to disarm, but in disarming we also want 
to be sure that we are safe. We must be secure from out- 
side invasion and attack. How can we combine disarm- 
ament with safety? Is it by building battleships at forty 
million dollars apiece, which are ready for the scrap heap 
a few years after they are built? No. Is it by piHng up 
huge costs in armaments and munitions, shells, fortifica- 
tions, and all the rest of the passe modes of warfare which 
existed before the World War took place? Again the an- 
swer is obviously no. 



AMERICAN COAL-TAR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 9 

But there is a way in which we can have national safety 
and yet have very little expense, and very little, if any, 
temptation to use our means of defense for any other 
purpose. 

The whole answer can be put in a single sentence — 
build up and maintain an independent, self-sufficient, self- 
sustaining American coal-tar chemical industry. 

To one unacquainted with the facts, the question natu- 
rally suggests itself — why is this so? The answer is 
simplicity itself. 

What do we need to build up this unique and highly 
complicated industry? We need materials. We need 
machinery. We need men. And we need money. 

What do we need to wage a war of self-defense? 
Again, we need materials. We need machinery. We need 
men. And we need money. 

But the thing which is not obvious, but which is true as 
truth itself, is that precisely the same materials, precisely 
the same machinery, precisely the same men, and precisely 
the same money are needed in making poison gases, ex- 
plosives and the other materials needed in modern war- 
fare, as are used in making the peace-time commodities 
turned out by the dye and related chemical industries. 

Here is another question. Do you know that our whole 
American population of 110,000,000 people spends less 
money for dyes for all purposes in the course of a year 
than it takes to build two modern battleships? The 
American consumption of dyes in 1920^ amounted to 
60,000,000 pounds and these dyes were valued at approxi- 

^ Later statistics are not yet available. 



10 F. E. BREITHUT 

mately $ i .00 per pound. So that $60,000,000 would cover 
the total value of dyes consumed, and, as stated above, a 
thoroughly modern, up-to-date battleship costs in the 
neighborhood of $40,000,000. 

When you have your battleship, you have something 
which may, perhaps, sometime be of use, but the chances 
are that it will not. When you have your coal-tar chem- 
ical industry, you have something which not only gives 
us all the colors which make life sweeter, pleasanter and 
gayer, but you have factories that are making drugs to 
soothe and heal the sick, delightful flavors, perfumes, 
synthetic resins for phonograph records and telephone 
equipment, synthetic tanning materials, the basic mate- 
rials for making paints, and a long line of variegated sub- 
stances which it would take hours merely to catalogue. 

There is another thing which needs to be remembered. 
This industry is produced by men, but do not let us for- 
get that men are produced by the industry. The per- 
sonnel of a highly technical plant such as a dye, perfume, 
or other synthetic organic chemical plant, cannot be pro- 
duced in a day or a week or a month. It requires years of 
specialized training, years of patient thought, labor and 
application, and years of undivided attention to the trans- 
lation of experimental research and development into the 
larger imits of production. 

And should war come, as war may, we have in every 
one of these plants a potential battleship, a land battle- 
ship, which has cost the public nothing and which stands 
there ready to be converted almost instantaneously into 
an arsenal for the general defense. 



AMERICAN COAL-TAR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY n 

The coal-tar chemical industry must be protected, and 
must is the word we want to use. Those who have 
thought most about this subject are unanimously agreed 
that the limited embargo is the only satisfactory way of 
adequately protecting this industry. 

Free-trade England diddled around for a year, very 
nearly lost her domestic industry, and finally came to 
this as the only solution possible. Italy, France and 
Japan have adopted similar measures. Is America to 
remain the only nation, along with China, to be the prey 
of the sordid and insidious German industry? 

We Americans are at the crossroads. If we are going 
to be foolish enough to discard the tremendous accom- 
plishments of the last few years, let us do so with our 
eyes as well as our mouths open. If not, and we believe 
we are not going to be so foolish, let us grant this in- 
dustry the form of protection which it has legitimately 
earned by its energy, initiative, and possibility of use for 
the general welfare and the national defense. 

Frederick E. Breithut 



THE FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR 
EDUCATION 

THE relations of the United States Government to 
education are unique. In no other first-class nation 
is there so little recognition by the central government 
of the important connections between education and other 
national concerns, and this in spite of the fact that popu- 
lar education has probably had a more extensive develop- 
ment in the United States than in any other civilized 
land. The principal reason for the position of the United 
States Government with respect to education is imdoubt- 
edly to be found in those clauses of the Constitution which 
reserve to the states all powers not specifically conferred 
upon the federal government. For one hundred and 
thirty-five years education has been considered a func- 
tion of the states and not of the national government. 
The national government has — in theory at least — no 
control of education in the states. 

This fundamental provision in the organic law of the 
nation meets with almost universal approval. Practically 
no one wishes the federal government to exercise con- 
trol over the educational affairs of the nation. But, on 
the other hand, professional educators and thoughtful 
citizens everjrwhere desire from the federal government 
service for the national educational system and recogni- 
tion of the part that education necessarily plays in the 



FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION 13 

great complex of national interests. Neither adequate 
service nor appropriate recognition has been provided. 
The fight to secure them has lasted through three gen- 
erations. 

In response to the early pressures that were brought to 
bear on Congress, the United States Bureau of Education 
was established. This office was originally an independ- 
ent department, but within a year it was reduced to the 
rank of a bureau and incorporated in the Department of 
the Interior. It was designed as an office for the collec- 
tion and dissemination of information concerning the 
status and progress of education throughout the United 
States. For the most part it has fulfilled the functions 
assigned to it in the Act under which it was created. 
Naturally a large portion of its record of American edu- 
cation has been statistical. And gradually the Bureau 
has created a current statistical summary of American ed- 
ucation that — in spite of all its defects — is unmatched 
in any country in the world. The Bureau's investigations 
of special problems in the field of education, furthermore, 
and its numerous monographs on important educational 
topics have had a considerable influence on the progress 
of education in different parts of the country. These ac- 
tivities doubtless constituted the only service that was 
absolutely required from the government during the latter 
part of the nineteenth century. 

In the last twenty years, however, there has been a 
rapid change in the inter-relations of educational move- 
ments within the several states. Educationally the coun- 
try has suddenly ceased to be parochial. Those in charge 



14 S. P. CAPEN 

of all types of institutions on all educational levels are 
at last aware that they are members one of another. A 
national educational consciousness has arisen. This is 
manifested by countless groupings of those concerned 
with education; regional groupings, state groupings, 
groupings by subjects of instruction. The United States 
is said to be the paradise of associations. In no other 
field has the association-forming habit been more prom- 
inently displayed than in the field of education. And this 
is because no other means have existed to secure unity of 
aim or method, or to make available the resources of 
leadership. 

It is, after all, principally leadership which the country 
has more or less blindly sought for twenty years. Edu- 
cational officers preoccupied with a local problem, unable 
by reason of faulty means of communication to secure 
more than a local outlook, have felt the need of some 
central agency endowed with the breadth of vision to see 
local endeavors in their true perspective, able to coordi- 
nate and to fuse the scores of related or conflicting im- 
pulses, and so to make them count as parts of a genuine 
national program. Leadership of this sort the Bureau of 
Education has never been equipped to give adequately. 
Congress has always been deaf to the appeals of Commis- 
sioners of Education for the necessary financial support. 
But because new educational enterprises have required 
new kinds of service from the government and occasion- 
ally have demanded intelligent direction, other govern- 
mental agencies have been brought into being. Indeed, 
to students of government one of the most depressing of 



FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION 15 

recent administrative phenomena has been the multipli- 
cation of bureaus, boards and commissions under the 
federal government dealing largely or exclusively with 
education. At the time when the United States entered 
the war there were approximately thirty such offices. 
Every special war service, however, shortly discovered 
that it had an educational task on its hands. When the 
armistice was signed there were over eighty separate gov- 
ernmental establishments concerned largely or exclusively 
with education. Not only was there no organic connec- 
tion among them, they were even, for the most part, 
uninformed of each other's activities. Naturally there 
was confusion, confusion in Washington, but far more 
confusion among the unhappy educators of the country 
with whom several of these independent government 
agencies undertook to deal. This was quite evidently not 
the type of leadership which the educational officers had 
been demanding. It was a leadership of the Tower of 
Babel. 

But the experience of the war did more than indicate 
how ineffective the government was to influence or direct 
educational movements within the states. It showed also 
how far the educational system of the country has failed 
to provide intellectually efficient and physically fit citi- 
zens. It revealed the appalling percentage of physical de- 
fectives, of illiterates, of unassimilated immigrants from 
other lands. Unquestionably education, public and pri- 
vate, under local control has scored a partial failure. 
What is the country going to do about it? 

The educational forces of the country have been 



1 6 S. P. CAPEN 

aroused by these revelations. It has been almost unani- 
mously agreed among them that some change in the gov- 
ernment's position toward education must now take place. 
Just what this change is to be is still a matter on which 
agreement has not been reached. There is a prominent 
proposal which has received the endorsement of a consid- 
erable percentage of the teaching profession and also of 
many bodies of laymen. This has been embodied in two 
bills before Congress, one of which is now awaiting the 
action of that body. In brief it provides for the creation 
of a Department of Education with a secretary in the 
President's cabinet; for the transfer to that department 
of the Bureau of Education, and for decision by Congress 
as to what other boards or bureaus should also be trans- 
ferred. It provides further for the appropriation by Con- 
gress annually of $100,000,000 to be distributed to those 
states which make equal appropriations for the eradica- 
tion of illiteracy, the Americanization of immigrants, the 
extension of physical training, the payment of teachers' 
salaries and the training of teachers. 

But the measure has met opposition in the house of 
its friends. There are educational leaders who disap- 
prove of both propositions which it includes. For the 
most part, however, the proposal that there should be 
a Department of Education is acceptable to the educa- 
tional public. But there has been formidable opposition 
within the ranks of educators to the proposal for large 
government subsidies to be granted to the states on the 
dollar for dollar basis. This issue now constitutes the 
most serious cause for division between two important 



FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION 17 

groups of teachers and educational administrators. Un- 
doubtedly it is also one of the most momentous matters 
of educational policy that has ever come before the school 
world. Nor does it concern education alone. Funda- 
mental principles of government are also involved in the 
decision which must eventually be made. 

Two considerations appear to be basic to the decision, 
namely — what do the educational systems of the country 
really need from the federal government and what kinds 
of service has the government proved that it can most 
effectively render in connection with other national under- 
takings similar to education. 

Certain of the needs have already been alluded to. Now 
since there is a general agreement that the federal gov- 
ernment should not operate the educational system of the 
country as it operates the Post Office Department; since 
practically no one believes that the long-standing relation- 
ship between the federal government and the states should 
be altered in the field of education, it follows that the 
educational system needs from the federal government 
the performance of only those functions and services which 
the states and similar governmental imits cannot perform 
for themselves. In other words, there should be a refer- 
ence upward to the national government of tasks that 
have definitely proved to be beyond the power of the 
states. Can certain of these functions and services be 
identified? As a matter of fact three are very conspicuous. 

I. States cannot insure the consideration of education 
in the formation of general national policies. And edu- 
cation is not only one of the largest concerns of the nation 



l8 S. P. CAPEN 

with respect to the capital and personnel devoted to it, but 
it is perhaps the most potent force both for molding 
national attitudes and for fostering national well-being. 

2. States cannot gather information on a national scale 
and make those comprehensive studies of the national 
educational undertakings that are required to promote 
efficiency and guide the development of educational 
practice. 

3. States cannot focus on national problems the best 
thought of the country and so furnish leadership in the 
determination of national educational policies. 

These things certainly the states cannot do. And if 
they are to be done for the welfare of the nation it becomes 
the government's task to do them. No one surely knows 
whether there are other similarly important tasks which 
the states cannot perform. It is not certain, for instance, 
that states cannot or should not assume full financial 
fesponsibility for the support of education within their 
borders. That subject requires more exhaustive study 
than has yet been devoted to it. Since there is uncer- 
tainty here and with respect to several other undertakings 
with which some persons would charge the federal govern- 
ment, it would seem wise not to burden with them what- 
ever federal agency is created. 

The government has been carrying on a long and highly 
instructive series of experiments in dealing with the vital 
interests of the nation. A scrutiny of these is very help- 
ful in determining what kinds of service federal agencies 
can best render in the field of education. The Government 
of the United States is engaged in two quite different kinds 



FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION 19 

of national service. The first is defensive or conservative, 
the second is creative. Under the defensive service of the 
government are properly grouped all those long-established 
activities relating to the raising of money, the provision 
for military defense, the administration of justice, the con- 
duct of foreign affairs and postal communication. The 
agencies which the government has devised to carry on 
these activities are agencies of self-preservation. Within 
the spheres in which they operate they must control ab- 
solutely the lives, the property or the conduct of citizens, 
else the nation's safety is endangered. Back of these 
agencies has always lain the full physical force of the 
government. 

The second kind of service, the creative service, is 
quite different in character. In it are included those ac- 
tivities designed to foster industrial production, to encour- 
age scientific inquiry, to promote social welfare and to 
advance education. Very evidently the sanction behind 
the government's participation in these activities is not 
force. What is it? It is persuasion. This is proved 
by reviewing the history of any of the government estab- 
lishments that deal with these creative interests. 

Let us take two examples. The Department of Agri- 
culture effected a revolution in the nation's basic industry 
in the short space of fifty years. How? By painstaking 
scientific investigations, by the dissemination of knowl- 
edge, by ideas, by publicity. In other words, by persua- 
sion. The major part of the great development in agri- 
culture, which is largely traceable to the Department of 
Agriculture, was wrought before the Department had 



20 S. P. CAPEN 

had conferred upon it any large executive powers and be- 
fore it was in a position to dispense any considerable 
subsidies. 

The Children's Bureau, with a much shorter history, 
has had a profound influence over the conditions of em- 
ployment and the physical and intellectual welfare of 
children in all parts of the country. But until the present 
year the Children's Bureau had no powers and adminis- 
tered no subsidies. Its influence has been due to the 
accuracy of its studies of sociological conditions and the 
vaHdity of the conclusions contained therein. In this case 
also the Bureau has ruled by persuasion. 

Now both the Department of Agriculture and the Chil- 
dren's Bureau have recently had administrative responsi- 
bilities thrust upon them and have become the disburs- 
ing agents for large government grants. What the effect 
will be on the Children's Bureau it is still too early to 
determine. The effect on the Department of Agricul- 
ture of the administration of mandatory laws and huge 
government grants has already been deplorable. Its 
prestige has not been eclipsed, to be sure, but the Depart- 
ment is now beset by difficulties and antagonisms that bid 
fair to change entirely the relation toward it of the inter- 
est which it serves. 

Certain obvious conclusions suggest themselves. The 
nation needs a new federal agency for dealing with its 
educational interests ; an agency which will unify the gov- 
ernment's own educational undertakings, which is 
equipped to carry forward studies on a large scale of the 
educational problems of the country and to furnish the 



FEDERAL ORGANIZATION FOR EDUCATION 21 

kind of leadership that is based on ascertained facts and 
ideas. The agency must represent a consolidation of 
bureaus and offices at Washington. It must be a larger, 
better supported, more influential establishment than any 
now devoted to education, an establishment that can com- 
mand the service of the best minds in the country. 
Whether this establishment should be an independent 
department, a commission or a division of a department 
is of secondary importance — although most people have 
their preferences. Of primary importance is the assign- 
ment to it of only those functions which have in the past 
proved helpful to the creative interests of the nation. 

S. P. Capen. 



AN EPISTLE IN JUNE 

Dear Doctor: 

(Best I like your title won 
In those old days when most of us had none; 
At that dark period when degrees were few, 
We said " The Doctor," meaning always you.) 
" Knee-deep in June," as Riley wrote, we stand. 
The same green branches flaunt on every hand 
As when our faded bricks wistaria wore, — 
Long passed into a purple metaphor ; 
We breathe the same sweet breath of leaves and grass 
While we sit slaving under midnight gas, 
Dispensing marks with pencils blue and red, 
Reaping sad harvest of the things we said; 
And when alPs done, the same bright wave of youth 
Breaks in Commencement, leaving us, in sooth. 
Flat as a sandstretch at the ebb of tide. 
Dipsychus' demon slips up to the side 
Of the tired teacher, with his whispered doubt: 
" Now we^re alone — what was it all about? " 

Somehow, the very trick of such June weather 
Evokes the ghosts of years we spent together; 
The narrow room that topped the long stone stair, 
The little circle grouped at noontide there, 



AN EPISTLE IN JUNE 23 

Faces long since dispersed, by Memory's power 
Brought back, with all the humors of the hour; 
Book-talk, and jests that lightened to and fro. 
The give-and-take of thirty years ago; 
And in the midst I see The Doctor sit. 
The central source of wisdom and of wit. 

In that old time of building, you and I 

Laid the first course in walls now soaring high; 

All our young passion of work is in those walls, 

Set fast, cemented till the structure falls; 

Part of the past your solid labors are, 

And still you build, still looking toward a star. 

We've seen the world change round us, as we wrought. 

In manners, customs, standards, types of thought; 

Art, verse, the drama, fiction, alter too ; 

And in new modes we serve a city new. 

Yourself, your substance, generous still you give, 

That this New Youth a loveHer life may live, 

Spurred by the impulse evermore to share 

What you have found of gracious, good, and fair. 

So be it long ! I know you love not rest. 

But should at last the leisure hour seem best, — 

As to your sometime comrade oft it seems, — 

Heaven grant you all fulfilment of your dreams : 

Peace, freedom, friends, kind books that never fail, 

Fresh roads to follow and new seas to sail. 

I steal from Shakespeare's scrip a final grace: 

" Thy own wish wish I thee in every place." 

Helen Gray Cone . 



THE MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 
IN THE UNITED STATES 

THE following resolution was addressed to Elizabeth 
Blackwell by the Medical Class of Geneva Medical 
College, October 20, 1847: 

Resolved: That one of the radical principles of a Republican 
Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every 
branch of scientific education the door should be open equally to 
all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member 
of our class meets with our entire approbation. 

" The history of the movement for introducing women 
into the full practice of the medical profession is one 
of the most interesting of modern times. The interest 
lies even less in what has been so far achieved, than in the 
opposition which has been encountered; in the nature of 
this opposition; in the pretexts on which it has been sus- 
tained, and in the reasonings, more or less disingenuous, 
by which it has claimed its justification. The history, 
therefore, is a record not more of fact, than of opinion, 
and the opinions expressed have often been so grave and 
solid in appearance, yet proved so frivolous and empty 
in view of the subsequent event, that their history is not 
unworthy careful consideration among that of other 
solemn follies of mankind." (Mary Putnam Jacobi, 
M. D., Introduction to Woman in Medicine, 1891.) 

24 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 25 

When in 1776 the American Colonies became the 
United States of America, women were practicing medi- 
cine, many, apparently, with as good an educational 
background as men. At the opening of the War of the 
American Revolution, it was estimated that over three 
thousand five hundred men were practicing medicine in 
the Colonies, of whom only four hundred had received 
medical degrees/ The medical student was taught by a 
preceptor in the latter 's office and while making visits to 
patients. An ambitious student received instruction from 
two or more preceptors. Then groups of students were 
taught by two or more preceptors who gave lectures in the 
office of one of the preceptors or in private rooms, thus 
forming miniature schools of medicine. There were but 
two good medical schools in the Colonies at the time of 
the Revolution, the University of Pennsylvania, organized 
in 1765, and the Medical Department of Kings College, 
New York, organized in 1767. The two schools together 
had bestowed a total number of fifty-one degrees of Doc- 
tor of Medicine before 1776. During the Revolution, the 
Medical Department of Kings College was qlosed to 
students. 

Dissecting the human body was prohibited. Medical 
books were few and were imported. A few had been 
written and published by men who combined the offices 
of clergyman and physician. The first of such books, 
entitled A Brief Guide in the Smallpooc and Measles , was 
written in 1677 by a Boston clergyman. The first medical 
book written by a physician. Dr. John Jones, 1775, was 

^ WalsH; History of Medicine in New York. 



2 6 ANNIE S. DANIEL 

called Precise Practical Remarks on the Treatment of 
Wounds and Fractures.^ There were two medical libra- 
ries, the Pennsylvania Hospital Library, 1762, which con- 
tained at the time of the Revolution two hundred and fifty 
volumes, and the New York Hospital Library, 1776. 
There were no medical journals published. There 
were four medical societies: Boston, 1775; New Jersey, 
1760; Philadelphia, 1765; New York City, "about 
1769." 

One is not surprised to read that " quacks abounded," ^ 
both men and women. An ordinance was passed in New 
York City in 1716 to regulate the practice of medicine 
in the Colon j^ of New York in 1760, and New Jersey 
passed such an ordinance in 1772. 

The practice of obstetrics and the diseases of women 
was almost entirely the work of women. But three men 
were prominent as obstetricians. In 1762 lectures on 
obstetrics had been given to men in Philadelphia and 
opposition to " men midwives " had developed. 

Such, briefly, was the condition of medicine and its 
practitioners at the opening of the War of the Revolution. 
During the war, women continued the practice of medi- 
cine. The men in the military hospitals were obtaining an 
experience which opened to them opportunities to study 
medicine on a large scale. As a result of this study, 
" there first breathed the spirit of medical science into 
the American profession." 

2 Dr. John S. Billings, Chapter in A Century of Medicine, 1776- 
1876. 

^ Garrison, History of Medicine. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 27 

Into this new era of learning, women were not per- 
mitted to enter. From Boston came the observation: " It 
was one of the first fruits of improved medical education 
that females were excluded from practice; and this has 
only been effected by the united and persevering efforts of 
some of the most distinguished individuals of the pro- 
fession." * The women were excluded not only from the 
practice of general medicine, but also from that of mid- 
wifery. The exclusion of women, especially from obstet- 
rics, created much opposition on the part of both men 
and women, and from this time began the long and not 
yet finished quest of women for the right to study medi- 
cine on equal terms with men. 

Almost innumerable objections have been made to 
the study of medicine by women, but there seems never to 
have been a real reason advanced. The objections have 
varied but slightly from the time of the Revolution to 
the present day, and have been urged against admitting 
women to the study of medicine in the colleges, in the 
medical societies, in the dispensaries and in the hospitals. 
The mental incapacity of women for study has been dwelt 
upon less in this country than in others.^ Physical fitness 
has always been considered at great length. One would 
infer from the objectors on this point that no woman was 
ever physically fit to do a month's work in medicine. As 
if medical work required at all times more strength of 
body than is required in any other field of labor! The 
objection by " those high in the counsels of the Almighty " 

* Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi^ " Women in Medicine," in Woman's 
Work in America, 
^ Jacobi. 



28 ANNIE S. DANIEL 

is to the effect that God never intended women to study 
or practice medicine.^ The rather fearsome assertion is 
made that women who study medicine would never want 
to marry. If, by chance, they did marry they would be 
unwilling to bear children, and that would be the end of 
everything. These objectors seemed to feel that every 
woman in the United States would insist upon studying 
medicine. A most awful objection was made by both men 
and women that the study of medicine would unsex the 
woman. Just what idea is intended to be conveyed by 
this is uncertain. It is said that the sensitive nature of 
woman would be so changed that she would become dead 
to the higher feelings of love and sympathy for humanity. 
As these are common to men as well as women, apparently 
the objectors fear that the study of medicine would not 
transform a woman into a man, but rather into a new 
and strange gender, neither masculine nor feminine. 
Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi were told 
to dress in masculine attire and that then they could 
study medicine.^ Evidently the masculine dress would 
act as a preventive against the dreadful possibility of 
becoming unsexed. The fear of competition has been a 
constant argument against women in medicine. She 
" would presume to put her sickle into the harvest of 
others." ^ To Elizabeth Blackwell it was said: " You 
cannot expect us to furnish you with a stick to break our 
heads with." From Boston came the objection in 1852 : ^ 
" Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other 

^ Jacobi, 

■^ H. J. MozANS, Woman in Science. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 29 

matters with a view to reorganizing society." One 
gathers from this remark that society in 1852 was about 
right. Cardinal Gibbons in 1891, in speaking of well- 
trained women physicians, said: " I wish to emphasize 
as strongly as possible the moral influence of such a body, 
than which there could be no more potent factor in 
the moral regeneration of society." ^ The real obstacle 
which makes it impossible for women to study medicine 
with equal opportunities with men is the fixed idea of the 
men of the utter impossibility of co-education. '' It is ob- 
vious that we cannot instruct women as we do men in the 
science of medicine; we cannot carry them into the dis- 
secting room and hospital" (Boston, 1820).^ '^ Co- 
education would not increase the dignity of men nor the 
modesty of women." ^ 

The desire of women to study medicine never ceased, 
but no door would open for them, until in 1845 the heroic 
figure of Elizabeth Blackwell appears, stimulated by the 
words of a friend, " suffering of a painful disease," who 
told her that if she could have been treated by a lady doc- 
tor, she would have been spared her worst sufferings. 
Elizabeth Blackwell was told " that there were innumer- 
able obstacles in the way of, such a course," and that " the 
idea, though a valuable one, was impossible of execution." 
She needed, she writes, " an absorbing occupation, and 
the idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed 
the aspect of a great moral struggle and the moral fight 

8 Cardinal Gibbons, " The Opening of Johns Hopkins Medical 
School to Women," in the Century Magazine, February, 1891. 
^ Jacobi. 



30 



ANNIE S. DANIEL 



possessed immense attraction for me." Then began 
the quest for a college willing to receive her. Finally, 
her friend, Dr. Warrington of Philadelphia, ap- 
plied to the Geneva Medical School in New York.^*^ The 
faculty decided to submit the question to the judgment 
of the medical class (composed mostly of farmers' sons) 
with the condition that one negative vote would mean a 
refusal of the request.^^ It was later learned that the 
faculty was unanimously opposed to the admission of 
the woman, but did not wish to have the responsibility of 
refusing the Philadelphia physician. A meeting of the 
student-body was called which Dr. Stephen Smith, a 
member of the class, describes as " uproarious." When 
the question was put to vote, the whole class arose 
and apparently with one voice shouted " Aye! " A nega- 
tive vote was called for. A faint " Nay " in a distant 
corner of the room was heard, at which the whole class 
arose, crying "throw him out! " Amid screams the young 
man was dragged to the platform, crying out: "Aye! 
Aye! I vote Aye! " A unanimous vote was thus ob- 
tained, and word of the result sent to the faculty. The 
student-body was composed of wild, lawless young 
men. Dr. Smith states that "It is quite impossible 
to magnify the power of the personality of Miss Black- 
well over the lawless elements of that class." This influ- 
ence continued to the end of her college course, January 
23, 1849, when the degree of Doctor of Medicine was 

^° Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work hi Opening the Med- 
ical Profession to Women. 

^1 Address of Dr. Stephen Smith, Memorial Meeting, Dr. Eliza- 
beth and Dr. Emily Blackwell, January, 1911. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 31 

given to Elizabeth Blackwell. The door had opened 
to allow one woman to enter and then closed to others, 
so great was the opposition to the study of medicine by 
women. 

In the fall of 1847, ^iss Harriet K. Hunt applied to 
Harvard Medical School for permission to attend lec- 
tures, and was promptly refused.^^ Again in 1850 she 
applied. The medical faculty approved, but the students 
objected. Three colored men had at the same time ap- 
plied for admission, and at a meeting held by the students 
in December, 1850, regulations were passed " remonstrat- 
ing against the amalgamation of sexes and races." In 
1866 and in 1867, women again applied only to be refused. 
In 1868, women attended the lectures of one of the uni- 
versity lecturers, not a member of the faculty. " This 
was declared to be inconsistent with the rules," and the 
women were sent away. On April 8, 1878, the Sum of 
ten thousand dollars was offered the Medical School if 
it would admit women on equal terms with men. The 
offer was given careful consideration but declined, the 
medical faculty voting 14 to 4, the overseers 17 to 7. 
" During the World War, permission was given to women 
to enter the Harvard Medical School who were registered 
at RadcHffe, provided ten qualified women applied. The 
regulation was passed late in the year and ten women did 
not apply. Since then they have not been admitted in any 
way."'' (April, 1922.) 

^2 Dr. James R. Chadwick, " The Study and Practice of Medicine 
by Women" in International Review, October, 1879. 

^3 Letter from Assistant-Dean, Harvard University Medical School, 
April, 1922. 



32 ANNIE S. D.\XIEL 

After the admission of Dr. Blackwell in 1845, the 
appHcations of women for entrance into the established 
colleges became more frequent and more insistent, and 
were continually refused. Not infrequently they were ad- 
vised, rather curtly, " Get your own college." The first 
medical school for women was established in Boston, No- 
vember 23, 1848, and was first called the '^ Female Medi- 
cal Education Society," and later the '' New England 
Medical College." ^^ The school seems not to have been 
well managed. In 1874, it was merged with the School 
of Medicine of the Boston University. In 1850, the 
Female ]\Iedical College of Philadelphia was opened, 
and in 1867 the name was changed to the " Woman's 
Medical College of Pennsylvania." ^* The idea of estab- 
lishing this college originated from the suggestions 
of Dr. Fussell who asked, " Why should not women 
have the same opportunities in life as men? " The 
opposition to the College was long and bitter. Phy- 
sicians who taught in the School or consulted with 
the women were threatened with expulsion from the 
Medical Societies. Their brethren refused to consult with 
them. " In 1853, the School adopted the longest course, 
five months, of any medical school then existing in the 
country." The College is now the only medical school 
open only to women. In 1853, the Penn Medical College 
of Philadelphia was opened ui that city in opposition 
to the Woman's College. It was co-educational, is 
described as irregular, and was discontinued in 1864. 

^* Historical Outline, Woman's Medical College of Penn- 
sylvania. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 



33 



Other colleges devoted exclusively to women had been 
opened in various parts of the country. Few colleges, not 
of the highest standard, were willing to admit women. It 
was a period in the history of medicine in the United 
States when to obtain a charter and open a medical school 
required little money and offered poor advantages. " De- 
grees are conferred with altogether too much ease, and 
it is unhappily true that the title of Dr. does not nec- 
essarily guarantee either good acquirements, good char- 
acter or good sense " (1856).'' 

In 1854, a charter had been obtained by Dr. Elizabeth 
Blackwell for a dispensary and hospital in Nev/ York for 
the distinct purpose of giving practical bedside instruction 
to young women, an opportunity which they could no- 
where else obtain. In 1865, the necessity of providing 
good opportunities for the study of medicine by women 
became an extremely important question. The Trustees 
of Dr. Blackwell's hospital, chartered as the New York 
Infirmary for Women and Children, considered the ques- 
tion from two points of view: First, the proposition " to 
establish scholarships for women in the College of Phy- 
sicians and Surgeons, such scholarships to be endowed to 
the amount of two thousand dollars a year, the students to 
be selected with care and entered as beneficiaries of the 
Infirmary and to be withdrawn if they proved unworthy," 
or to establish a college for women in connection with 
the Infirmary .^^ The questions were considered care- 

^^ Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, An appeal in behalf of the Medical 
Education of Women (1856). 

^^ Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Address Delivered at the Opening of 
the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary, November 
2, 1868. 



34 ANNIE S. DANIEL 

fully by the faculty of the College of Physicians and Sur- 
geons. " The opinion was expressed that the only way to 
forward the most thorough medical education of women 
was to found a medical college in connection with the 
Infirmary and Dispensary with a standard equal to that 
of the best medical colleges for men." November 2, 1868, 
the college was opened. Four features were incorporated 
in the plan of instruction: 

1. A three years' college course; 

2 . A larger proportion of time devoted to teaching and 
practical instruction than to lecturing; 

3. A progressive succession of studies; 

4. '' The introduction of hygiene into our course as a 
prominent and obligatory study." (When this prospectus 
was put forth, no college in the country required such a 
course.) 

A Board of Examiners was appointed consisting of the 
best medical men in the city, before whom each student 
appeared for final examination. This feature of the col- 
lege antedated by several years the State Board of Ex- 
aminers. The three years' course was not at first oblig- 
atory. The first class was graduated in 1870, the last in 
1899. " The friends who established and have supported 
the Infirmary and its college have always regarded co- 
education as the final stage in the medical education of 
women." ^^ During several years the faculty had 
considered two methods for this accomplishment. First, 
" the affiliation of the separate woman's medical college 

^^ Dr. Emily Blackwell^ Address at the Closing of the Woman's 
Medical College, May 25, 1899. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 



35 



with a university." No university had however been 
willing to do this. The other proposition was " the ad- 
mission of women to university schools on the same terms 



as men." 



Co-education had come to the women in the Eastern 
States, in one of the best medical schools in the United 
States, the Johns Hopkins Medical School, in 1893. 
" From the outset, it was felt that a foundation like the 
Johns Hopkins Hospital would not fulfill its highest mis- 
sion if the courses of instruction were not free to all, and 
they have been thus open from the beginning." ^^ It was 
not until Cornell University opened its Medical Depart- 
ment in New York City that the Trustees of the Infirm- 
ary College felt that a separate school of medicine for 
women was no longer required in New York. It had kept 
its ideal of providing a college for women equal in its 
standards to the best colleges for men. In fact its require- 
ments had very often been a little in advance of those of 
men's colleges. 

The possibility or impossibility of co-education in medi- 
cine was considered by the Board of Regents of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan in 1870.^^ The question was dis- 
cussed at great length, one side stating that " Co-educa- 
tion would not increase the dignity of men nor the mod- 
esty of women." " The faculty would give a full course 
of medical instruction to females at any convenient time 
and place for a suitable compensation," or a separate 

^^ Dr. William Osler, " The Opening of the Johns Hopkins Medical 
School to Women," in the Century Magazine, February, 1891. 

^^ " Memorial on Female Education," University of Michigan 
Reports, 1870. 



36 ANNIE S. DANIEL 

female college in Ann Arbor or Detroit would be 
founded. Because men and women during the pioneer 
days labored together at the same tasks, quite naturally 
the girls and boys attended college together,'^ and, 
" under pressure of public sentiment against the wishes 
of most of the Professors," women were admitted in 
1870.'' 

Johns Hopkins School must be co-educational under 
the conditions of its endowment. The charter of Cornell 
University is such that women must be admitted to the 
Medical School. The Medical School of the University of 
Pennsylvania (1765) admitted women in 19 14 as regular 
students for the M.D. degree."^ On March 29, 1916, at 
the meeting of the Board of Permanent Officers of the 
Yale University School of Medicine, '' it was voted to 
admit a limited number of qualified women, provided the 
necessary expenses for alterations of the buildings could 
be met." "^ The expenses were met, and, in September, 
19 1 6, two women were admitted. The College of Phy- 
sicians and Surgeons of Columbia University admitted 
women in 191 7. The number each year is limited to ten.^* 

2° Letter from James B. Angell, " Education in the Western States," 
in Woman's Work in America. 

2- Not until 1904 were women admitted on equal terms with men. 
(Letter from Secretary of Medical School, University of Michigan, 
April, 1922.) 

22 Letter from the Dean of the Medical School of the University of 
Pennsylvania, April, 1922. 

2^ Letter from the Dean of Yale University Medical Department, 
April, 1922. 

2* Letter from the Dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, 
Columbia University, April, 1922. 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 37 

One hundred and forty-six years after the expulsion of 
women from the practice of medicine, women are able 
to obtain a medical college education on equal terms 
with men, except in Harvard University. Medical co- 
education in the colleges is no longer an experiment. Of 
Johns Hopkins Medical School, Dr. William H. Welch 
says: " The presence of women has Hfted the tone not 
only of the students, but I may say also of the professors 
of the school." 

Having obtained her diploma from the Geneva College, 
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell writes, in 185 1, that she had no 
medical companionship. The profession stood aloof. No 
medical society would admit her until in 1869 a Medical 
Library and Journal Association in New York City ad- 
mitted her. The County and State societies were closed 
to women. These associations are the trade unions of 
medicine. It is extremely important that a physician be- 
come a member, not only for the companionship but for 
the opportunities which such societies offer for the con- 
tinued study of medicine. In Massachusetts, year after 
year for twenty-five years, the women applied for mem- 
bership only to be refused. The announcement of the 
successful entrance of women was noted in the Boston 
Medical and Surgical Journal, October 9, 1879, as fol- 
lows: "We regret to be obliged to announce that at a 
meeting of the Councillors held October ist, it was voted 
to admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.'' 
To the Philadelphia County Society, women first applied 
in 1858 and were admitted in t888. Dr. Mary Putnam 
applied to the New York County Society in 1873 at the 



38 ANNIE S. DANIEL 

suggestion of Dr. Jacobi, the President, " whom she mar- 
ried a few months later," and was admitted. Women are 
now admitted to all County Societies on equal terms with 
men. Kansas admitted women to the State Society in 
1872. To the American Medical Association (the na- 
tional association), women applied in 1870 and were ad- 
mitted in 1876. Every State now admits women to its 
medical society. 

As long as the individual practices medicine, the study 
of medicine continues. Dr. Blackwell in 1851 applied to a 
city dispensary for admission, and was told to get her 
own dispensary, which she did in 1854. Many dispen- 
saries throughout the country are now open to women, 
some on equal terms with men. The necessity for the 
continued study of medicine and the closure of all hos- 
pitals to women caused Dr. Blackwell in 1857 to open 
the New York Infirmary in Bleecker Street, conducted 
by women for women and children, and for the practical 
instruction of the woman doctor. During the next 
twenty-five years, five hospitals were opened by women 
for the study of medicine by women. Now many hospi- 
tals throughout the Republic are open to the young in- 
terne for her first year after graduation. Few are open 
to the older women for the privilege of becoming attend- 
ing physicians, and the same excuses are made that pro- 
hibited women from entering the colleges. 

When in the course of human events the sons and 
daughters of Aesculapius study medicine with equal op- 
portunities in college, dispensary and hospital, then will 
be written a most romantic chapter in the history of med- 



MEDICAL EDUCATION OF WOMEN 39 

icine in the United States, relating the story of the heroic 
women and the men who walked beside them to open the 
door to women of a great opportunity to serve those who 
suffer. 

Annie Sturges Daniel 



COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN 
NEW YORK CITY 

IN 19 14; two bills were introduced in the Legislature, 
one amending the education law to except New York 
City from the requirement of maintaining a Per- 
manent Census Board, and the other amending the charter 
of the City of New York by requiring the Board of Educa- 
tion to establish a Bureau of Compulsory Education, 
School Census, and Child Welfare and transferring to said 
bureau the duties and powers theretofore exercised by the 
Permanent Census Board, together with the staff and 
property of that board. These bills became laws: the first 
with the approval of the Governor only, and the second 
with that of the Mayor of the city as well. 

Prior to the appointment of the director and the assist- 
ant director on June 24, 19 14, the Board of Education 
adopted, as required by the statutes, by-laws organizing 
the bureau and providing for its contro] and develop- 
ment. The bureau is generally known as the Bureau of 
Attendance. 

Since that time, continuation schools have been estab- 
lished by a State law and the attendance at these schools 
is looked after by the Bureau of Attendance. Later on, 
the issuance of employment certificates, formerly in the 
hands of the Board of Health, was delegated to the Board 

40 



COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN NEW YORK CITY 41 

of Education, and the issuance of these certificates was 
turned over to the Bureau of Attendance. 

To carry out all these provisions of law, the bureau has 
308 field workers and 109 clerks together with a director, 
an assistant director, and a chief attendance officer. 

The law provides that the school census shall be 
amended from day to day, and this is as it should be, 
because an up-to-date census is fundamental to the en- 
forcement of the compulsory education law. 

The School Census 

Complying with the requirements of the School Census 
Law, the bureau does as follows: 

1 . Maintains the registration of children between 4 and 
2 1 years of age and amends such registration from day to 
day, as required by law. 

2. Verifies the statements of parents as to the enroll- 
ment of children in school, and places in school those 
children found not to be enrolled. 

3. Issues census age certificates and certificates of iden- 
tification when required. 

4. Notifies, at or before the beginning of each school 
term, the parents of children who are of compulsory school 
age who are not receiving instruction or who will at any 
time during the school term following become of compul- 
sory school age or privileged to attend school, of the obli- 
gation or privilege of such children to attend school, and 
the names and locations of schools at which attendance 
may be required or permitted. 



42 JOHN W. DAVIS 

5. Provides, through a carefully amended alphabetical 
file, the means of locating and identifying any child within 
the prescribed ages residing in the City of New York. 

6. Establishes agreements with other cities, municipal- 
ities, and states, and with public and private institutions 
or agencies for supplying information of the prospective 
arrival within the City of New York or departure there- 
from of children within the prescribed ages. 

7. Compiles the statistics of the juvenile population by 
block or smallest unit of area for use in connection 
with the selection of school sites and buildings, the pro- 
vision of playground and recreational activities and other 
related activities. 

8. Prepares for definite areas or districts suitable studies 
of school enrollment by school, grade, sex, and age, and 
provides information for the most economical use of exist- 
ing and added school facilities. 

Our experience with the permanent school census shows 
that it is the only adequate basis for the enforcement of 
the compulsory education law. It identifies each child, 
keeps track of him, and locates him at all times. 

It provides an accurate forecast of the number of chil- 
dren for whom instruction must be furnished each year and 
each day. It minimizes late entrance into school and con- 
sequent retardation. 

It takes note of the shifting of population, as well as of 
its increases, and thus indicates in advance the need for 
new school activities. 

If any given area is affected by immigration, increase or 
decrease, it registers the fact and the amount. 



COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN NEW YORK CITY 43 

It provides a follow-up of employed children and thus 
enables the school authorities to list and compare the oc- 
cupations of pupils with the character of instruction given 
them. 

Its child population statistics are necessary for the de- 
velopment of recreational facihties. 

Compulsory Education 

As interpreting the requirements of the Compulsory 
Education Law, the bureau proceeds as follows: 

1 . It tries to raise the level of attendance in public, pri- 
vate, and parochial schools by reducing to the lowest pos- 
sible minimum the amount of irregular attendance due to 
other than lawfully recognized causes. 

2. It provides for the apprehension, arraignment, 
mental and physical examination, necessary treatment, 
and rehabilitation of the persistently irregular or habitu- 
ally truant or delinquent child. This includes commitment, 
if necessary. 

3. It selects from this group of children those whom de- 
fective physique, or mentality, or environment render 
incapable, temporarily or permanently, of response to the 
ordinary means of persuasion or correction. 

4. It provides, through such agencies and individuals 
as are available, for the relief and help of those children 
who through poverty, accident, or other cause, lack the 
means of support necessary to their attendance at school. 

5. It prosecutes through the courts (a) those persons 
in parental relation to such children as are truant or 



44 JOHN W. DAVIS 

irregular in attendance because of the neglect or failure 
of such parents to exercise a due measure of parental 
responsibility, or who, for the sake of gain or other selfish 
motives, wilfully and persistently refuse to comply with 
the law; (b) those children who are habitually truant or 
irregular in attendance or disorderly while in attendance 
and who have been adjudged beyond the control of their 
parents. 

6. It advocates and assists in the establishment of 
special schools and classes, where needed, for children 
deprived of the facilities of public education because of 
physical disqualification. 

7. It inspects and examines the roUbooks of schools. 

Child Labor 

In addition, the enforcement of certain requirements of 
the Labor Law is laid upon the Bureau of Attendance, to 
wit: 

1. To issue permits and badges to properly qualified 
children for 

(a) Carrying and distributing newspapers over a 

newspaper route. 

(b) Selling newspapers, magazines, or periodicals, 

after 6 a.m. and before 8 p.m., exclusive of 
school attendance. 

2. To patrol the particular localities where newspapers, 
magazines, or periodicals are sold by boys. 

3. To prosecute employers who employ children con- 
trary to the provisions of the compulsory education law. 



COMPULSORY EDUCATION IN NEW YORK CITY 45 

4. To secure the organized co-operation of all agencies 
and individuals interested or concerned with the regula- 
tion of street trading. 



Child Welfare 

The child welfare section of the Law has been inter- 
preted by the bureau as follows: 

1. To make such investigations and prepare such re- 
ports and statistics as may be feasible concerning children 
whom the circumstances of environment tend to deprive 
of the training or physical development contemplated by 
the compulsory education law. 

2. To endeavor to obtain material aid, personal care, 
or other suitable attention for the families of children or 
the children themselves, the lack of which causes irregular 
attendance, delinquency, or destitution. 

3. To develop and carry out a definite plan for the pro- 
vision of such relief with the organized charitable philan- 
thropic organizations. 

4. To co-operate fully with the Children's Court for 
the control of juvenile delinquency. 

5. To make investigations in connection with voca- 
tional guidance and to aid in the development of a pro- 
gram for vocational guidance. 

6. To follow up all cases of mature girls discharged 
from school and to prevent their withdrawal by unlawful 
means or without the knowledge and consent of their 
parents. 

7. To locate and report to the proper authorities places 



46 JOHN W. DAVIS 

of resort of truants and absentees from schools, where 
irregular attendance is accompanied by idleness and other 
objectionable or iniproper practices. 

From this resume of the Bureau of Compulsory Educa- 
tion, School Census, and Child Welfare, it will be seen 
that the bureau is dealing with a social problem as well 
as an educational one. The attendance officers are of a 
high type and strive to put themselves in the place of the 
boy or girl whom they are studying. They know his fam- 
ily, his environment, and his reactions, and in case they 
are not able to solve the problem individually but need 
the help of some one versed in psychology or medicine, 
this is readily obtainable. 

The point is that the pupil must be studied as an entity 
and every available means tried to change him from an 
anti-social attitude to one in harmony with his surroimd- 
ings, thus making him better fitted for good citizenship. 

The following is a report on the work of the Bureau 
of Attendance for the school year from September i, 
1920, to June 30, 192 1. 

Number of cases received and closed 608,591 

Number of hearings held 17,818 

Number of court cases 3j583 

Amount of fines imposed $4,605 

Number of commitments; 

By Director of Bureau 579 

By Children's Court 64 

On account of violation of parole 280 923 

Newsboy permits issued i>830 

John W. Davis 



SOCIAL AND OTHER STUDIES 

THE term Social Studies, while it has been in common 
use by the National Educational Association and 
some other organizations for at least a decade, is still 
rather new, and is consequently not well known to 
the exoteric. In fact most of what is connoted by this 
term is still generally referred to, even in some educational 
circles, as History and Civics. 

The Social Studies include those elements of history, 
economics, political science, sociology, geography, and 
possibly psychology, ethics, anthropology, ethnology, etc., 
which may be used in the organization of school curricula. 
The unifying element in the field of study and teaching 
is the fact that the Social Studies deal with such contri- 
butions as scholars can make to the knowledge of man 
as a gregarious animal working with his fellows for the 
common good. 

The expression may be made clearer by a reference to 
the developing organization of the curriculum of the 
secondary schools. It is becoming more and more widely 
recognized that the studies in the secondary schools must 
be organized in groups for purposes of clear thinking 
on the problems of efficient organization. Some curricu- 
lum-makers are advocating a six-unit system composed, 
for example, of English, foreign languages, mathematics, 
science, practical arts, and social studies. Others would 

47 



48 EDGAR DAWSON 

make a seven-unit system and others would use somewhat 
different principles of grouping. The basic idea is that 
every pupil should become somewhat facile in the use of 
his mother tongue; secure some of the educational value 
to be derived from the study of a language other than 
his own; receive some of the training and develop- 
ment derivable from the study of mathematics; be led 
to grasp the meaning of modern science; be introduced 
to some of the practical arts; and devote some time 
and effort to the Social Studies. This classification, 
through the process of elimination, serves to clear up to 
some extent the notion here under discussion by indicat- 
ing what the Social Studies do not include. 

A distinguished university professor of economics, 
who has given a large amount of attention to the Social 
Studies in secondary education, because he believes that 
the pursuit of the study of society in the institutions of 
higher learning is conditioned by a more thorough devel- 
opment of the Social Studies in the secondary schools, 
was recently quoted as making the following incisive 
statement about the Social Studies: 

" The organization of the Social Studies in the public schools 
should be in terms of the purpose of introducing those studies. 
Their purpose is that of giving our youth an awareness of what it 
means to live together in organized society, an appreciation of how 
we do live together, and an understanding of the conditions prece- 
dent to living together well, to the end that our youth may develop 
those ideals, abilities and tendencies which are essential to effective 
participation in our society." 

There are not a few leading educators who hold that 
the relation of the Social Studies to the organization of 



SOCIAL AND OTHER STUDIES 49 

the schools is not a problem of getting these studies into 
the curriculum, but one of organizing the curriculum 
around the Social Studies, making them in reality the 
core and determining principle of the entire work of edu- 
cation. If the basic thought which runs through the 
above quotation is sound, then this notion that the Social 
Studies should be the core of education can hardly be 
successfully attacked. Man and his activities are deter- 
mined largely if not wholly by motives. Science and 
language and practical arts are implements to be used by 
man as directed by his motives. Ethics, one of the basic 
contributing agents to the Social Studies, goes back to 
the examination of the ultimate motives. Civics con- 
cerns itself with the nearer and more practical, and it 
concerns itself more particularly with the social motives. 
It is not infrequently said that ethics refers to the indi- 
vidual motives and civics to the collective motives. The 
Social Studies deal with all of the ramifications of the 
problem of relating motives to action in organized so- 
ciety. Therefore it seems that these Social Studies 
should very properly be carefully examined to determine 
whether or not they should constitute the unifying ele- 
ment in education. 

A large part of education is concerned with the effort 
to hand down to the next generation what earlier genera- 
tions have handed down to us in so far as we have found, 
on careful examination, that this heritage cannot be im- 
proved through addition or elimination. In recent centu- 
ries science has been adding to our heritage much both of 
knowledge and clarity of thought. Much barbarous super- 



50 EDGAR DAWSON 

stition has been eliminated; much of the encrusted igno- 
rance and intolerance bequeathed by the sad conditions 
of savagery has been broken away and man has been liber- 
ated. This liberation possibly reached its climax in the 
time of the French Revolution if by liberation we mean the 
freeing of the individual from all the trammels of tradi- 
tion and convention. Some of the wisest of our fellow 
workers now believe that this liberation of the individual 
went too fast and that the reorganization of the group 
should have gone with it. The study of this reorganization 
of the group on the basis of the experience of the world 
called history is the task of the Social Studies. The hand- 
ing down to the next generation the best we have of knowl- 
edge on the subject of co-operation and the best we have of 
training for the use of this knowledge is the task of the 
teacher of the Social Studies. 

In primitive times the patriarch or ancient gathered 
his people about him and recited the deeds of the family 
or clan. The medicine man or priest passed on the taboo 
and other warnings against the dangers which infested 
the path of individual and group. They were primitive 
teachers handing on the torch of knowledge. Only by 
their ministrations was " history " started and elementary 
knowledge sent on its journey down the ages. Now the 
printed book replaces tradition and the trained teacher 
takes the place of the elder, but the function is of ever 
growing importance. 

One of the difficulties which has stood in the way of the 
wisest development of the Social Studies has grown out 
of the fact that the imiversity scholars who have to do 



SOCIAL AND OTHER STUDIES 51 

with the development of the study of history, economics, 
poHtical science, sociology, geography, etc., have not been 
familiar with school conditions and therefore have in many 
cases not been able to contribute to effective work in the 
schools. There has been a tendency for the university 
scholars to think of the schools in terms of university study 
and so they have encouraged the pushing of narrow depart- 
mental teaching down into the schools where it is even 
more dangerous than it is in the college. 

Another difficulty has grown out of a failure of educa- 
tional experts to recognize what contributions university 
scholarship may make in this, as in other fields of teaching. 
Many university departments of education where school 
teachers are trained, have carried on their work as if they 
thought a person could teach in the secondary schools a 
subject which he does not know, if only he has had some 
training in the psychology of children. This training in 
the nature of the child's mind is of course a condition pre- 
cedent to the best teaching, but it is a condition precedent 
only in so far as it is a means of enabling the teacher to 
teach what he knows. It is a means of facilitating teach- 
ing; it does not supply the teacher with his most important 
equipment. 

While the scholars and the educational theorists (using 
the latter term in the best sense and with no uncompli- 
mentary connotation) have been working more or less at 
cross purposes, many high school principals and principals 
of private secondary schools have been assigning the Social 
Studies to teachers who were wholly untrained either in 
content or in method of instruction. With this neglect on 



52 EDGAR DAWSON 

the part of the responsible authorities, the Social Studies 
have in many places lain fallow while a sort of formal 
thing called history and a little civics have been taught in 
dry-as-dust exercises. It may be that this sad condition 
is not more characteristic of the Social Studies than of 
work in other subjects. But it is more conspicuous when 
one considers the enormous service the Social Studies could 
render to this bewildered world if only work in them were 
effectively organized. Furthermore it will be disputed by 
no one with even the most superficial knowledge of the 
present practice in the schools that those who teach Latin 
or geometry are expected to have a little more preparation 
than those who teach history. While this a fact, it is also 
known, though to a smaller circle of the better trained, 
that the teaching of a subject such as history is far more 
difficult than the teaching of mathematics or language, 
though it may not be more difficult than real teaching of 
literature. 

Light seems now to be breaking on the leaders among 
the workers in the Social Studies and in those aspects of 
education closely related to the development of this field. 
The hope which is said to spring eternal in the human 
breast seems to have a good foundation for rational ex- 
pectation that within the next few decades the prepara- 
tion of the young for life in a democratically organized 
world will be more carefully organized and more effective 
than it has ever been before. 

An organization called the National Council for the 
Social Studies has been organized. It is made up of his- 
torians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, geog- 



SOCIAL AND OTHER STUDIES 53 

raphers, and other scholars; school administrators, 
teachers, and students of the science of education. The 
officers of this organization are among the leaders in their 
respective fields, and they seem to be actuated by some- 
thing almost akin to the crusader's devotion. 

The purpose of this organization is to bring about such 
co-operation among the groups, which are able to con- 
tribute to efficiency in this field, as will tend to eliminate 
lost motion, duplication of effort, cross purposes and fric- 
tion. If this purpose is achieved there can be no doubt 
that a movement forward will be inaugurated which will 
be irresistible to the force of ignorance and obstruction. 

The organization proposes to do two things at once. 
The first is to discover and list for purposes of correspond- 
ence those teachers and others whose life interest is the 
teaching of the Social Studies. There are many of these 
working in large and small communities toiling often under 
the most distressing hardships and discouragement, con- 
ditions which make their efforts almost useless. 

The second is to list and describe all of the leading ex- 
perimental efforts looking to the development of the Social 
Studies. This list will, through its explanatory annota- 
tions, bring out the common elements in these experiments 
and thus isolate and make conspicuous those differences 
of opinion which need incisive discussion. Frank discus- 
sion and criticism will then follow as a natural thing; and 
the elimination of conflicting views will also follow as a 
natural consequence of the discussion. One of the bases 
on which must always rest real argument for democracy 
is the fact that the human mind is naturally fair and 



54 EDGAR DAWSON 

reasonable; and that the full and dispassionate discussion 
of any subject will in the end bring the light which all 
sane minds can see and approve. 

Such a program does not look to anything like a bureau- 
cratically standardized system of education for a kind of 
pseudo-democracy that having become fixed is dead. It 
looks to a condition in which well trained teachers will 
teach as they wish and will organize their work in the light 
of the local conditions that confront them ; but they will be 
trained in the truth and the truth is one. They will be 
trained in methods of adapting the truth to conditions 
which are as different as are the leaves in the forest. They 
will be professional persons in the sense that their lives 
will be devoted to a purpose for the pursuit of which pur- 
pose they have given themselves adequate preparation and 
for the attainment of which they are willing to maintain 
an unflagging campaign of readjustment in the light of 
developing knowledge about a constantly changing world. 

But all this work in the Social Studies is conditioned 
for its success on accompanying work in providing the 
sound body in which the sane spirit and clear mind may 
live. 

There are those who, after reading a biologist such as 
Professor Edwin G. Conklin, are likely to infer that hu- 
man evolution has reached its highest stage, and that 
therefore we have nothing finer than our present society 
to hope for. I fell into such a trap when I read one of his 
lectures and wrote to ask him whether he meant to en- 
courage any such attitude. My error was due to my gross 
ignorance of biology and he soon set me right by saying, 



SOCIAL AND OTHER STUDIES 55 

as I remember it without a written record, that he beUeved 
that human society is only on the first rounds of the lad- 
der of its evolution. He seems to believe that with a 
proper teaching of organized co-operation in the light of 
constantly developing scientific knowledge of human 
psychology, a future society may be hoped for which 
might realize many of the long-harbored dreams of the 
millennium. 

It thus appears that the human animal is only just 
entering " modern history/' only beginning to study the 
way men can live together in peace and mutual helpful- 
ness. The many will be born and work through dull dis- 
couraged lives and die; but the few to whom Providence 
has given that disturbing vision of the possible which char- 
acterizes poets and philosophers will continue to scan 
the horizon for the promised land with the confidence 
that " the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the 
first was made." 

Human Society, guided by ideals, served by science, 
will continue to grow until civilization is attained, — a con- 
dition in which intelligent people will live civilly together 
in wholesome contented communities. If this dream comes 
true the physiologist with the psychologist will be the 
creators and the builders. 

Edgar Dawson 



SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 

Consisting of certain rambling remarks, more or less 
autobiographic, by a veteran schoolmaster. 

AS I came out of my front door this morning, carrying 
a portfolio under my arm, a group of little children 
came dancing toward me on their way to school. One of 
them looked up and said: " Say, Mister, are you too going 
to school? " I answered: "Of course. Bright Eyes. I 
have been going to school for seventy years, and hope to 
go forever." They stopped, seemed to eye me with won- 
dering amusement, and then we walked down the street 
together, laughing and chatting as we went. 

Having studied in many schools, having had many 
teachers, having myself been a teacher, having been a 
Trustee in many institutions of learning, having been the 
Chancellor for a decade of one of the largest universities 
in America, and the Director for two decades, or more, 
of one of the largest Museums in the land, it has occurred 
to me that perhaps I have the right to say a few things 
about schools and teachers, without exposing myself to 
the charge of immodesty in approaching this very sacred 
theme. 

In its lowest aspect teaching is the communication of 
knowledge to others. 

In a certain sense the world is what its teachers have 
made it to be. 

56 



SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 57 

The various civilizations, which exist to-day in different 
parts of the globe, are fundamentally inheritances from the 
past. Whatever culture exists anywhere is based upon 
old knowledge transmitted from former generations to 
the present. Upon the foundation of old knowledge new 
knowledge is being slowly built. The process goes on, how- 
ever, somewhat unequally. Coupled with learning there 
is forgetting. Ascertained facts are not always recorded. 
There were arts, which have been lost. It is true, never- 
theless, that the power possessed by different nations and 
tribes has come to them through teaching. The native 
of the Congo owes what skill in the arts and crafts he has 
to what he has learned from those who went before him. 
The same is true of the most highly cultivated citizen of 
Great Britain or the United States. Some peoples have 
inherited but little knowledge ; other races have inherited 
more; some a great deal. The so-called "backward races " 
have had limited schooling ; the so-called " advanced 
races " have had higher advantages in the way of instruc- 
tion. I will not enter into the question of the relative 
cerebral capacity of the races from the standpoint of the 
anatomist and physiologist, though that is a tempting 
theme. I have held the Piltdown skull in my hands, and 
have talked about it, with my friend Dr. Arthur Smith- 
Woodward at my side. As Rudyard Kipling says, " That 
is another story." 

Instruction comes to men in many different ways. 
There is an old Welsh triad which says: " The three pillars 
of learning are seeing much, reading much, and suffering 
much/^ 



58 W. J. HOLLAND 

One of the greatest teachers is Nature. We can only 
learn from her by observation. Many of the backward 
races seem to have had no other teacher than Nature. 
Observation of things and oral tradition have been the 
sources whence they have imbibed knowledge. They do 
not always appear to have drunk deeply or wisely from 
these two well-heads. Nevertheless it is at times surpris- 
ing to the student to discover how much the backward 
races really do know about things within their horizons. 
The Indians of South America and the peoples of the 
African hinterlands sometimes awaken astonishment by 
their nice powers of discrimination, when it comes to dis- 
tinguishing plants, insects, birds, mammals, and their 
habits. There is a vast store of interesting lore stowed 
away under the unkempt pates of some people whom we 
call savages. 

Savages are not the only students of Nature. All of the 
achievements of our boasted modern science have been 
based upon hints given by Nature. Joseph Henry found 
the mercury, which he had put into a bowl, spilled upon 
the shelf. The cabinet had been locked. He had the 
key in his pocket. The bowl was empty. He noticed that 
a piece of lead, having a A-shape, was standing with one 
end in the bottom of the bowl, the other outside upon the 
shelf. He came to the conclusion that the mercury must 
have escaped from the bowl through the lead, which had 
acted as a syphon. From that hint sprang up a whole 
body of treatises upon the porosity and conductivity of 
bodies before that time called solid and thought to be 
impermeable. Alexander Graham Bell, when he was a 



SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 59 

boy, had used two tin cans without bottoms with parch- 
ment stretched tightly over their open tops, Hke a drum- 
head, and a string drawn taut from drum-head to drum- 
head to transmit sound for a long distance. This device 
was often used as a sort of toy when I was a boy. I rigged 
up one when I was a lad of ten, and I used it to commu- 
nicate with one of my playmates, who lived '^ around the 
corner." Other lads in the village had them. Dr. Bell, 
who was experimenting to find out how to convey sounds 
to deaf ears, hit upon the idea of substituting an electri- 
fied wire for the string, and behold the foundations for 
the telephone were laid. We know to-day that not even 
a wire is needed, but that the wonderful somewhat, which 
we call the " ether," which fills all space, and which is in- 
finite and eternal, will transmit waves of sound when 
transformed by the " radio-process." Last night, seated 
in my home in Pittsburgh, I heard a concert which was 
being given four hundred miles away, and enjoyed it. 

Books are teachers. 

If Solomon could say " Of making many books there is 
no end," what must be said to-day? My little library is 
greater than that which was possessed by any king or 
emperor in the days of Greek and Roman glory. Charle- 
magne is said to have had a library, which was the wonder 
of his time, although he could neither read nor write. It 
consisted of eight hundred volumes. I own many thou- 
sands of books, and I work under the roof of a great 
building, in which there are nearly half a million of books; 
books in many languages, and upon every conceivable 
subject. The accumulated wisdom of the ages is at my 



6o W. J. HOLLAND 

right hand, and I hold the key. The best part of an edu- 
cation is to know what book to consult, when you wish to 
ascertain an opinion, or a fact. 

Some men have had no other teachers than books. Such 
men have not always been " bookish." I dislike mere 
" book-worms," who read everlastingly and put their win- 
nings to no good use. If a man has chosen rightly and 
has mastered only one book, he may be in his field a 
very formidable antagonist. " Beware of the man of one 
book! '' That is an old saying. 

Experience is a great teacher. 

We learn much by the simple act of living in contact 
with our fellow men or with Nature. The lessons of expe- 
rience are often hard. Happy the man who has the wis- 
dom to learn from the experience of others! The boy, 
who has seen a comrade fracture his skull against a stone- 
wall, should not after that, in order to prove to himself 
that stone-walls are dangerous, butt his own head against 
a wall. 

In the end the best teachers are men and women. An 
old teacher of mine used to say: " The highest education 
is not derived from books, but from contact with men^ 
big men^ 

The qualifications of a great teacher of the human sort 
are a finely cultivated and richly stored mind, high prin- 
ciples, and the power not merely of imparting knowledge 
in a gracious and winning way, but of arousing en- 
thusiasm. 

The teachings of the home have been largely determi- 
native of the careers of multitudes of men and women. 



SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 6 1 

I may say personally that in my own little life I owe an 
unspeakable debt to my father, who was a man of learn- 
ing, and to my mother, who was an accomplished musician, 
a painter, and possessed of great literary taste. My father 
taught me the scientific names of plants and animals at 
the same time that he taught me their English names. 
When I was a boy of eight I knew that White Clover is 
Trifolium repens, that the name of the blue-bird is Sialia 
stalls J and so on in hundreds of cases. When I went to 
college, botany was " a cinch.'' I was taught to read and 
speak German in my infancy, and a little later French. 
German was the language my parents used in speaking of 
confidential matters, when they did not wish " the 
children " to understand, and we children were therefore 
quick to acquire a knowledge of it. I never had wiser, 
kinder, or more capable teachers than my father and 
mother. Every memory of them is blessed. 

Later on I had many tutors. I attended many schools, 
from one of which I was happily expelled for playing 
pranks, and helping to give the master " a licking " for 
cruelly beating his dog in the presence of the school. I 
was confided to the care of a private tutor, reputed to be 
the most learned man in western North Carolina. He was 
an invalid and had only four pupils. He was a great 
scholar, and a great saint. We four boys loved him, and 
he filled us with a passion for study. I studied in two 
colleges, graduating from the first when I was seventeen, 
and from the second when I was twenty. During my 
senior year at Amherst my chum was Neesima, the first 
Japanese educated in America, who helped to make ^' the 



62 W. J. HOLLAND 

new Japan." I taught him Greek so that he might read 
the New Testament in the original ; and he taught me some 
Japanese, which came into good use in later years, when 
I was the Naturahst of the U. S. Eclipse Expedition to 
Japan in 1887. After graduation I became a teacher, and 
a month after my twenty-first birthday entered upon the 
duties of the Principalship of the High School at Amherst, 
and the next year served as the Principal of the High 
School at Westboro, Massachusetts. In docendo dis- 
cimus. My pupils taught me a great deal. Then I went 
to Princeton. For three years I studied Hebrew, Chaldee, 
and Arabic under Dr. William Henry Green, a great man; 
and theology under Dr. Charles W. Hodge, the grandson 
of Benjamin Franklin. 

Since my last graduation I have been studying harder 
than I ever did in school, college or seminary. Thousands 
of men and women have been teaching me. I have learned 
much from Christian clergymen of many denominations, 
from Jewish rabbis, from Buddhist abbots in the orient, 
and mollahs in Morocco. I have mingled freely with pro- 
fessors and presidents of colleges and universities. I have 
stood on terms of intimacy with many of the most distin- 
guished men of science in the past and the present gener- 
ation; I have numbered among my instructors many of 
the leading men in manufactures, commerce, and finance. 
I have picked up a few things worth knowing from kings, 
queens, emperors, and presidents, whom I have learned to 
know, and with whom I have conversed. I have learned 
a lot from seamen and soldiers. I have had as occasional 
instructors coolies, thieves, and vagabonds. " Bill " Quan- 



SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 63 

trell, the son of the master of the first school I ever at- 
tended, taught me to make " cats-cradles." He was much 
older than I. He was shot in Kentucky in 1864, after he 
had perpetrated the infamous Lawrence Massacre. He 
died with his boots on. My mother once spanked me for 
playing with him. He was the '' bad boy " of the village, 
when I knew him, and inherently cruel in his instincts. 

As I look back over the three-score and ten years, during 
which I have been going to school, I can recall many 
teachers I disliked, some whom I adored. None stand out 
in memory more clearly than Julius Hawley Seelye and 
Dr. Charles H. Hitchcock, both of Amherst. The former 
taught me to think straight and concentratedly; the latter 
not to be afraid of the face of man. The former was a 
second father to me ; the latter I learned to honor for his 
transparent truthfulness and engaging frankness. Many 
a time I went to " Old Doc," as we affectionately called 
him, to ask a question, and it was refreshing as morning 
breezes to hear him say: " I don't know; and there is no 
gentleman in the Faculty who knows." 

This leads me to observe that education does not consist, 
after all, so much in the impartation of knowledge, as in 
the awakening in the soul of a consciousness of its latent 
power, and of a sense of the inevitable limitations of 
human nature. A truly great teacher is the one who 
quickens his pupil to make the best of himself, who trains 
him to love the service of his fellow men, and to walk 
reverently and humbly in the presence of the infinite 
mysteries which are wrapped about all of human life. 

W. J. Holland 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION 
IN 1918 

INTERNATIONAL accord is most bravely illustrated 
by the fact that for over a hundred years armed Amer- 
icans and Canadians have freely crossed and recrossed 
a frontier three thousand miles long for the purpose of 
kilHng bear, moose, and caribou. During the Great War 
all kinds of commissions arose for the reconciliation of 
differences between the Allies. These commissions gave 
common information of mutual interest and brought about 
an even-handed distribution of assets. National ignorance 
or selfishness, when exposed by open argument, frequently 
retired and hid itself ashamed. Often these commissions 
exercised almost sovereign rights, as did the Shipping 
Board in its control of the merchant marine of all the 
Allies. To produce international harmony and amity 
sovereign rights must be sacrificed; they must be subject 
to reasoned control. Every American should ask himself 
whether, if a demand by Washington upon Mexico to sa- 
lute the American flag were adjudged wrong by an inter- 
national commission appointed by France, Italy, and 
Great Britain, he would bind himself to accept that judg- 
ment or whether he would lightly prefer the arbitrament 
of war. The great Disarmament Congress at Washington 
shows clearly what may be accomplished when nations 

64 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN 1918 65 

which are mutually suspicious come together around a 
table. 

The only interallied commission of purely scientific 
character was the Interallied Scientific Food Commission. 
As members of this commission, Professor Russell H. 
Chittenden, of Yale, and I were in Europe from March to 
June, 19 1 8. The situation of England was more precari- 
ous than that of any other country, for England before the 
war had grown only one-third enough food to support her 
great industrial population. Her ships were being sunk 
by submarines and many more were limping lamely back 
for repairs after encounters with these vessels. England 
needed above all bread grains, and these were largely im- 
ported to take the place of meat, butter, and sugar, which 
were to be had in very limited amounts. Now it happened 
that just at this time the United States had suffered from 
two successive poor years of wheat production. The 
carry-over of surplus wheat had been used the year before, 
and the wheat crop of 1917-1918 was only just enough 
to feed our own people. In the face of this Britain was 
demanding more wheat than she had ever previously con- 
sumed. From the viewpoint of a detached observer in 
Washington this evidently was an instance of English 
gluttony and greed, and I heard it so stated. 

It is well known that at this time Americans began to 
eat corn bread, even as our ancestors had consumed it. 
Many southern states patriotically passed laws forbidding 
the consumption of wheat. Through such measures nearly 
a quarter of our wheat crop was exported to Europe as 
fuel for the human beings engaged in battle, in munitions 



66 GRAHAM LUSK 

making, or for the nutrition of the little children who were 
to be the bearers of civilization following the war. Before 
leaving for England I called on my friend, Dr. Margaret 
B. Wilson, who had been " over there " a few months be- 
fore. She told me how she had instructed the Lyons res- 
taurant, the London counterpart of our Childs' restaurant, 
in the art of making corn bread, and I found later evidence 
of this work, for in the windows of their shops corn bread 
of fair quality was exhibited for sale. There are three 
reasons why corn bread was not taken in greater quan- 
tity as food by the English. In the first place, corn 
is more perishable than wheat in its shipment across the 
sea. Secondly, the English do not know how to make corn 
bread. I remember some atrocious material served to us 
as a delicate attention on one occasion. Thirdly, the Eng- 
lish do not like it. They associate the material exclusively 
with the diet of pigs. They recalled a time during the 
war when their bread was mixed with it, was yellow, and 
entirely distasteful. To an American this might seem a 
selfish attribute in English character, whereas it really be- 
longs in the category of national psychology towards food. 
Mr. Hoover could not induce starving Belgians to eat 
rice. A Frenchmen would die rather than eat oatmeal. 
The Italian thrives on corn in the form of polenta. The 
Englishman is devoted to his Yorkshire hog, whereas the 
Italian is happy only when surfeited with rice or 
macaroni. 

Appreciation of people living in a foreign land comes 
through contact with them, through knowledge of their 
conventions, and not through an application of one's own 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN 1918 67 

Standards to them. For example, we in America had an 
enormous crop of corn at the time of our poor wheat har- 
vest. We were told when we reached London that we 
should stop feeding corn to pigs, and even that we should 
ration corn in the United States. This advice came from 
eminent, but uninstructed, sources. We were able to point 
out that it would be as ludicrous to ration corn in the 
Middle West as it would be to ration the fish of the sea 
upon which the British were so largely depending for ani- 
mal food. They had no idea of the fabulous reserve of 
animal fodder which lies in our annual corn crop. 

The scientific men of the Royal Society of London had 
accomplished a very notable amount of work before we 
arrived. Through their activity a Ministry of Food had 
been upset and a more intelligent administration estab- 
lished in its stead. We reached London at the time of 
the introduction of the rationing system, when the scanty 
supplies of meat, sugar, and margarine were divided 
equally among the people, rich and poor alike, and at low 
prices. The week before 500,000 people had stood daily 
in long lines waiting to get into the butcher shops, a con- 
dition highly dangerous to popular contentment. After 
two weeks of rationing the queues disappeared from the 
streets because each family knew that it would be pro- 
vided for. 

Our mission was in part to endeavor to reduce the food 
demanded of the United States to a minimum, and it 
could not therefore become highly popular. Indeed, the 
presentation of the scheme produced resentment. Pro- 
fessor Gowland Hopkins truly expressed British opinion 



68 GRAHAM LUSK 

when he wrote me the day after a talk given before the 
Royal Society: ^'I hope you will understand that we have 
been a little nervous lest that, with low rationing, the 
productiveness and general conduct of the industrial 
workers in this country might suffer deterioration. I do 
hope that you will believe, at the same time, that when the 
necessity is shown, everybody in this country will cheer- 
fully come into line and make what is available suffice." 

As a whole, industrial England was never so well nour- 
ished. The per capita consumption of bread grains was 
530 gm., which contained 1400 calories or 55 per cent of 
the total food requirement. This contrasted with a pre- 
war consumption of only 30 per cent in the form of bread. 
The decreased consumption of meat by 60 per cent, and 
of fat and sugar by 50 per cent each, was automatically 
provided for by a compensatory increase in the bread con- 
sumption. Thus, Professor Noel Paton wrote: " The ad- 
vantages of having an elastic reserve of unrationed bread- 
stuffs to allow the diverse energy requirements of different 
individuals to be supplied, has been argued in a series of 
^ Memoranda by the Food Committee.' " And Professor 
W. B. Hardy, secretary of the Royal Society, stated the 
matter concisely, " Bread is not of itself sufficiently at- 
tractive to lead to consumption in excess of real appetite." 

The whole British attitude was one of reason and com- 
mon sense. 

When we arrived in Paris to hold the first session of the 
commission we found a very fixed determination on the 
part of the British delegation not to yield to the sugges- 
tion of a possible cut in the calculated food supply. After 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN 1918 69 

a heated discussion the following resolutions were 
unanimously adopted by the representatives of the United 
Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, and the United States: 

" That the requirements of the average man of 70 kilo- 
grams body weight doing 8 hours average physical work 
in a climate such as England's or France's is to be consid- 
ered as 3,300 calories as purchased, 

" That the Commission recognizes that in case it be- 
comes impossible to furnish this ration, a 10 per cent 
reduction could be borne for some time without injury to 
health." 

It was decided that 3,000 available calories as ingested 
were the requirement of the average man, thus leaving a 
10 per cent margin for spoilage or domestic waste. An 
average man would therefore require about 1,100,000 
utilizable calories per annum. 

To determine the energy requirements of a nation of 
men, women, and children it was necessary to fix the rela- 
tive quantities of food taken by the various elements of 
the population. What are known in England as Lusk's 
coefficients were adopted and are as follows : 



Age 


Coefi&cients 


Utilizable 
calories 


0-6 (both sexes) 

6-10 (both sexes) 

10-14 (both sexes) 

14 + (males) 

14 + (females) 


0.50 
0. 70 
0.83 
1. 00 
0.83 


1500 
2100 

2500 
3000 
2500 



70 



GRAHAM LUSK 



These figures allowed larger quantities of food to chil- 
dren than older authorities had thought necessary and 
were based on the scientific work of several American in- 
vestigators. Thus, it had been found by DuBois that 
boys of fourteen had as great a basal heat production as 
their fathers. Only recently (192 1) Benedict has demon- 
strated the fact that the quiet resting heat production 
(basal metabolism) of girls does not vary greatly from 
1250 calories daily between the ages of twelve and seven- 
teen years. This justifies the statement made in 191 7 that 
girls require the same quantity of food as their mothers. 
The height of women averages 4 inches below the height 
of men, and their basal metabolism per unit of size is 
7 per cent less, as DuBois has shown. They usually 
engage in less arduous physical work than do men, hence 
their lower nutritive coefficient. 

The energy requirements of a population, such as that 
of the United Kingdom, could now be calculated, as ap- 
pears in the following table: 

Estimate of the Caloric Requirements Per Diem or the 
Population of the United Kingdom in 191 i 



Age in years 


Number 


Calories 
per person 


Man value 


Calories 
in 1000 
millions 
per diem. 


Per cent 


0-5 

6-9 

10-13 

14+ (males..) 
14+ (females) 


5,772,000 

3,709,000 

3,548,000 

15,437,000 

16,808,000 


1500 
2100 
2500 
3000 
2500 


0.50 
0.70 
0.83 
1 .00 
0.83 


8,660 

7,790 
8,870 

46,311 
42,020 


8 

7 

8 

40 

37 




45,274,000 


2510 


0.836 


113,651 


100 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN 1918 71 

This table shows that in a community where a man is 
allowed 3000 calories the average allowance of all the in- 
habitants would be 2510 calories or 0.836 of the man's 
ration. If, therefore, one multiplies the population by 
its '^ man value " of 0.836 and then by 3000 calories, one 
can calculate its caloric needs. That the average inhab- 
itant, from a nutritional standpoint, is approximately 
equal to 0.83 of a '' man " was found to be true in all 
the countries represented on the Interallied Scientific 
Food Commission. 

If one now calculates the national food requirement of 
the United Kmgdom for a year, one reaches a total of 
41.5 milHon million calories per annum. Adding to this 
the ten per cent allowance for waste and loss, the total re- 
quirement becomes 45.6 million million calories. Now 
before this calculation was made the Royal Society had 
computed the average annual food supply of the United 
Kingdom during the years 1909—13 as follows: 

Home production 16 . 93 million million calories 

Imported food 30. 22 million million calories 

Total food 47-15 million million calories 

The '' man value " of this is 3,410 calories instead of 
3,300 adopted by the Scientific Commission. It appears, 
therefore, that there is probably very little waste of food 
in a population like that of England's " tight little 
island." 

It is apparent that, by following this line of analysis, 
one can estimate the food requirements of each allied coun- 
try for the year 1918— 19 and after this fashion the fol- 
lowing figures were reached: 



72 GRAHAM LUSK 

Calories in Millions 

United Kingdom France Italy- 
Total requirement 49,600,000 40,916,865 38,000,000 

Home production 17,200,000 24,519,652 23,000,000 

To be imported 32,400,000 16,397,213 15,000,000 

" But what practical application could be made of 
this? " the reader will ask. Consider the case of Great 
Britain, for example. Her population was the equivalent 
of 35,360,000 ''men" and 5,000,000 men in the armed 
forces. The Food Commission judged 75 grams of fat a 
desirable quantity for a civilian, while 150 grams were 
allowed daily for the soldier. To cover this requirement 
would be needed annually: 

For civilians: 35,360,000 X 75 x 365 = 968,000 tons fat 
For military: 5,000,000 x 150 x 365 = 274,000 tons fat 

Total requirement = 1,242,000 tons fat 
Home production = 486,500 tons 

Fat to be imported = 755,500 tons 

It was further estimated that the reduced quantity of 
meat taken by the civilian population would amount to 
1,200,000 tons per annum and that taken by the army to 
only a little less. The gross figures were as follows: 

Requirement of meat and pork 2,102,000 tons 

Home production 962,000 tons 

To be imported 1,140,000 tons 

The meat products, as planned for importation, con- 
tained 334,200 tons of fat which, deducted from the total 
fat importation program of 755,500 tons, left a remainder 



MEMORIES OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN 1918 



73 



of 421,300 tons which were to be imported in the form 
of margarine. 

Having determined the imports of meat and margarine, 
the remainder of the calories necessary for the mainte- 
nance of the nation could be covered by imports of wheat 
and sugar, as appears in the following table: 



Imports, 1918-19 


Metric tons 


Calories in millions 


Meat 

Margarine 

Sugar 

Wheat 


1,140,000 
505,000 
1,300,000 
5,330,000! 


3,667,000 

4,000,000 

5,330,000 

19,403,000 


Total 


8,275,000 


32,400,000 



! One ton of wheat equals 36.6 bushels and 2200 lbs. 

After a similar fashion the resources of France and Italy 
were analyzed, and their needs provided for. And what 
good came of it at last? The program laid down became 
the basis of Mr. Hoover's export program for the year 
1918— 1919, and the unseemly international wrangling in 
the meetings of the Meat and Fats Executive became a 
thing of the past because each nation was adequately and 
fairly provisioned. 

At the opening of the second session of the Interallied 
Scientific Food Commission, held in Rome in May, 19 18, 
Professor Chittenden, standing in the great room of a 
mediaeval palace which crowns the Capitoline Hill, said 
that, whereas in biblical times the edict had gone forth 
from Rome that all the world should be taxed, it was now 
proclaimed from the same capital city that all the world 



74 GRAHAM LUSK 

should be fed. In the hour of her distress, when her men 
were dying and suffering, Europe's call to America, " Give 
us this day our daily bread,'' was not heard in vain. But 
the bread has not been paid for, except perhaps in the 
blood of those dead. America has still generously and 
graciously to say, " And forgive us our debts as we for- 
give our debtors." 

Graham Lusk 



A POSTCRIPT 

I remember my first thrill from a book. It was a passage 
in one of the reading lessons in the old McGuffey's Fifth 
Reader — I was a reading marvel and read in this book 
when I was six. " We must educate; we must educate," 
ran this passage, '^ or we perish in our own prosperity. It 
took Rome three hundred years to die, and our death if 
we go down will be as much more terrible as our growth has 
been more wonderful and rapid." I stood barefooted toe- 
ing a crack in the floor and felt the orator's thrill as this 
awful exhortation and prophecy fell from my ineffective 
vocal organs. It seemed to me that something ought to 
be done about this thing. I had no idea what Rome was, 
or how her symptoms developed in that three hundred 
years of crossing the Stygian ferry, but clearly if education 
could save us from a worse dissolution, something ought 
to be done about it. And there I stood, a very ordinary 
little boy, looking stolid and unimpressed, drawing up 
and stretching out my toes on the pine floor, and being 
reproved by the teacher for calhng the word '^ turrible," as 
fine an example of the need of the country for education 
as one could have found in that long summer day. 

I wonder who wrote that lesson ! Clearly it was from 
some baccalaureate address, and must have been delivered 
after our country had attained to some greatness, but long 
before the War between the States. I suspect that it was 

75 



76 HERBERT QUICK 

from Horace Mann, but there were several men of that 
period who possessed the vision, the power, and the fervor 
to have uttered it. It would have astonished him to 
know — as perhaps he did — of its effect on a queer 
little boy out in an Iowa schoolhouse on the prairie. 
It was meant for the ears and the consciences of 
statesmen. It was Big Stuff. If he could have 
been given the duty of assigning me something to 
read, he would probably have selected something with- 
in the scope of the juvenile mind. But I doubt if he 
produced a greater effect on anyone by that speech than 
on me. I have never seen the piece since. I remember 
much of it still. I doubt if " The Brown Mouse " would 
ever have been written, if my mind had not been aroused 
to the necessity for popular education by those sentences. 
We never know what print and paper will do. Nor what 
sort of torch may be lighted, or where, by the flambeau 
handed down the lines of human succession in the world 
of thought. 

There was abroad then a feeling that education can 
do anything. We are becoming less confident as to that 
now. Not that we have ever tried education in the real 
sense, but we think we have. Three things have yet to 
be tried by Christendom — Christianity, Democracy and 
Education. They might all turn out rather well if we 
should give them a try-out instead of a talk-out. Certainly 
we shall have failed to put modern civilization on fair 
trial unless we do try them. We shall fail to discover 
whether my esteemed friend the baccalaureate orator was 
right or wrong in his plea that education can save us from 



A POSTSCRIPT 77 

the awful fate he looked back upon and foresaw. I 
wonder just how much real education can do for this 
nation? 

There is, for instance, the question of the latent capac- 
ity for development in the average person. We are peri- 
odically assured by specialists that most of our people 
at the age of thirty have only the mental capacity of ten- 
year-old children, and are incapable of either becoming 
anything superior to this, or of transmitting superior qual- 
ities to offspring. One might suggest that if this be the 
case our standards of comparison are too high. Clearly 
the ten-year-old standard can be no higher than the aver- 
age standard of the ten-year-old. This would seem to be 
mathematically indisputable. And then we may well har- 
bor doubts as to the validity of the tests applied. 

And the reference to the capacity for leaving good off- 
spring leads us to a vast deal of balderdash which only 
sounds wise, relating to the betterment of the race, or at 
least the arrest of the process of degeneration so often 
pointed out, by eugenic methods. It is balderdash for 
the most part. If the better individuals in the race are 
to play a larger part in this process, it involves a competi- 
tion in prolificacy between them and the ignorant — as- 
suming that the ignorant are unfit to supply the children 
of the future — and with the degenerate and perverted. 
In view of the fact that those are usually rated as the 
better individuals who have most adequately solved the 
problems of life, this eugenic plan calls upon those who are 
doing the most intellectual work in the world to take on 
the additional burden of competing in the production of 



78 HERBERT QUICK 

offspring with those who do none of it. Aside from the 
fact that the limitation of human power forbids this as 
an average result, the difference in the ages at which edu- 
cated and intellectual as compared with uneducated and 
subnormal men and women begin the business of becoming 
the parents of children puts the superior classes at a dis- 
advantage which cannot be remedied. The Chinese boy 
and girl, for instance, usually have had more children by 
the time they reach the age when the American boy and 
girl leave high school, than the American couple ever have. 
The number of children per family decreases in almost 
exact ratio to the attainment of the benefits of civilization 
by the parents. Time and vital power expended in the 
complex life cannot be at the same time utilized in pro- 
ducing large families of offspring. The principle of the 
conservation of energy forbids this. 

But if we could once draw a correct distinction between 
those who are normal, and those who are diseased or sub- 
normal, it would in my opinion make very little difference 
whether the children of the future are brought into the 
world by educated or uneducated, rich or poor, cultivated 
or uncultivated parents. So large a part of our personal- 
ities are derived from ancestors so remote that we have no 
record as to their qualities, that family records are of little 
value. Dr. David Starr Jordan has recently pubHshed 
records showing that such men as Theodore Roosevelt, 
Benjamin Harrison, George Washington, Abraham Lin- 
coln, Robert E. Lee, and a farmer in Massachusetts are all 
descended from certain great noblemen and royal per- 
sonages. This scarcely means that their royal or noble 



A POSTSCRIPT 79 

blood had anything to do with their greatness, so far as 
they were great. If complete records could be found, it 
would probably appear that these men were also descended 
from almost every fertile human strain in the countries 
from which their families are derived and in existence a 
thousand years ago. Not only would this be found true 
of these eminent men, but also of all of us. Our family 
lines cross and recross as they are traced back. We all 
are descended, not only from kings and nobles, but from 
peasants, scullions, outcasts, rich men, poor men, beggar 
men and thieves. But we take no pains to trace back to 
the latter. It does not seem to be worth while. Every 
race is such a plexus of crossing lines of descent, that 
given absence from moronism, and one family is as likely 
to produce a superior person as another, if not in this gen- 
eration, in the next. There is no warrant for believing in 
the superiority as ancestors of the people we have learned 
to call great in history. We can tell quite accurately 
the value of a fowl for either laying or meat uses, or of a 
beef animal. The carcass tells its story on the butcher's 
block. The evaluation of a human being is not such a 
simple matter. It is hard to say which of any person's 
excellencies are transmissible. And where a person pos- 
sesses great qualities, it is difficult to say whether they 
come from natural excellencies, or from fortunate training. 
Where the qualities are inherited, it is always difficult even 
to guess from which of its numerous lines of descent it is 
derived. The fact seems to be that every race possesses 
a great common fund of virtues, powers, and weaknesses, 
which must be assumed to belong in the character of every 



8o HERBERT QUICK 

normal member of it, and that his pecuHarities both good 
and bad are to be attributed to recessive traits accidentally 
cropping up, to dominances which may be with more or 
less certainty identified with his known parentage, and 
to traits developed or distorted by training or the lack of 
it. The only safe assumption for the race is that all men 
are equal, and that they are equally capable of receiving 
benefits from education. Of course they are not equal; 
but this is a fact that can be told only after the life has 
been to a greater or lesser extent lived. The only safe 
assumption is that they are; because while individually 
they cannot be, in racial strain in the main they are equal. 
The exception to this rule lies in the fact that there 
develops in all societies a class of morons, degenerates, 
and defectives, who, lacking self-control, give birth to 
numerous offspring, and in a society like ours, in which all 
human life is held equally precious, tend progressively to 
adulterate the racial life-stream with people useless to 
society, antagonistic to its welfare, and a danger to it. 
They breed true. They should not be allowed to perpetu- 
ate their defective strains. The difficulty of detecting 
and dealing with them is not great were it not entangled 
with religious and sentimental elements. But that these 
people, wholly irreclaimable as they are, and incapable 
of producing any offspring but their like, must one day 
constitute a recognized social danger is a thing of which 
I am convinced. Aside from these really diseased people, 
the fact must be accepted that our population must be 
dealt with as consisting of people who must be assumed 
to have equal capacities for development. 



A POSTSCRIPT 8 1 

Of course they have not equal capacities for develop- 
ment; but in few cases if any can an inferior or superior 
endowment be foretold of an unborn or newly-born child. 
Its racial characteristic alone can be estimated. The 
fact that for two, three, or even a larger number of gen- 
erations, its progenitors have exhibited high qualities 
which, in spite of enormous diffculties, can be definitely 
attributed to excellencies in personal endowments, means 
very little in any effort to determine exactly what the 
bloodstream actually is. And I have assumed the sur- 
mounting of obstacles which cannot be overcome except 
in very few cases. In short, it would be impossible to tell 
who are the best individuals to select out of any society 
if we were to begin now a policy of breeding for better 
people — a national policy of eugenics. We can at most 
detect only the positively degenerate and defective. This 
is another fact which warrants the term balderdash when 
used in describing much of the eugenics propaganda we see. 

Still another fact of similar sort would alone forever 
prevent any great improvement of society by a eugenical 
system. Any livestock breeder would laugh at the ridicu- 
lousness of the question if he were asked if he could im- 
prove the breed of any domestic animal in even such a 
simple matter as the capacity to convert feed-stuffs into 
good meat, to say nothing of such imponderables as moral 
and intellectual qualities, except by a rigid control of mat- 
ings. Under such control none but the best males are per- 
mitted to have progeny, and the females also are care- 
fully selected. If we could tell the best male when we 
saw him in a human society — which we cannot — the 



82 HERBERT QUICK 

subsequent problems are too revolutionary to be faced 
even. They involve such a complete abandonment of 
every moral, sentimental and religious position that the 
barriers against even an attempt to improve society by 
eugenics need not be stated. They need only be hinted. 
We lack the knowledge to begin with; and if we had the 
knowledge, the use of it would do society a hundred times 
more harm than it could yield in benefits. 

So, after all, we come back to the thought that all we 
can do is to provide each human plant with soil and air 
and temperature so that each may be an oak, a corn-plant 
or a lily as determined by its own inner spirit of growth. 
We may detect the weeds, and sometimes we may possibly 
be allowed to pull them out; but even this has its diffi- 
culties and perils. Mainly we must adapt our efforts to 
that wonderful spirit of growth. We must remember that 
the ignorant clod of an unlettered mountaineer has the 
same blood as his cousin who has grown proud of his aris- 
tocratic strain merely because his ancestors went on 
through to the Bluegrass soil, instead of tarrying in the 
hills. The heredity of every person is a mystery; but the 
conditions under which his best qualities may flower out 
are somewhat better understood. These favorable con- 
ditions are promoted by nothing so easily in the control of 
society as by education. So I come back to my first text 
from a book which thrilled me — the text from the bacca- 
laureate sermon in the old Fifth Reader: " We must edu- 
cate, we must educate, or we perish in our own prosperity. 
It took Rome three hundred years to die, and our death 
if we go down will be as much more terrible as our growth 
has been more wonderful and rapid." 



A POSTSCRIPT 83 

I apprehend that the man who wrote or delivered those 
burning sentences had in mind as the education which 
alone would save us from the fate of Rome the thing for 
the sake of which we have taxed ourselves more willingly 
than for anything else. Probably he was thinking of some- 
thing even more inadequate. He doubtless desired a 
system of schools in which boys, and possibly girls, would 
be launched into a sea of literature and mathematics, 
Greek, Latin, French, Italian, the higher mathematics, the 
things which all through the past had distinguished the 
educated from the ignorant. This was education, then. 
To a lamentable extent it is education still. For many 
years it never occurred to me that it was in any way de- 
ficient in the salt which might save us from the putrefac- 
tion of Rome. Attic salt was the great preservative. 

Finally and slowly the fear began to take possession of 
my mind that in spite of the fact that the nation seemed 
to be carrying out with liberality the very program 
called for in the old oration, we were beginning to show 
signs of perishing in our own prosperity and were exhibit- 
ing symptoms of the old Roman disease. Horatius — he 
of the bridge — was given of the corn-land which was of 
common right, as much as two strong oxen could plow 
from morn till night. We had once had much land which 
was of common right. I saw it pass from this status to 
that of private ownership. And then I saw coming upon 
us the tendency of the people to flock to the cities. When 
there was no more land which was of common right in 
the country, the opportunities for the poor man seemed 
better in the towns. The chances for success seemed better 



84 HERBERT QUICK 

there than in the country, for the man who had no land. 
Moreover, when the land was gone which was of common 
right, that which was of individual possession and individ- 
ual right grew so valuable that its owners in greater and 
greater numbers foimd themselves able to live in the cities, 
where life was so much " fuller and richer," — and live 
on the labor of others. So that the people who remained 
on the land, in larger and larger proportions of the popu- 
lation, were forced, not only to support themselves, but 
also to carry on their backs landlords living in cities. I 
saw grown up before I knew it a land system in which 
landlords with no traditions of landlord's duty to tenant 
or land, were rack-renting tenants without knowing it, 
more cruelly than the absentee landlords ever rack-rented 
the Irish peasantry. Overurbanization and landlordism! 
" Great estates," said Pliny, " are what ruined Italy! " 

Now what was education doing to keep us from shoot- 
ing the Roman chute? Seemingly nothing. Why? Well, 
perhaps there was something the matter with the system 
of education. Perhaps if the people of the open country 
were to be given education for rural life, instead of the 
frustum of a college course, two things might happen: 
They might see more things of charm and profit in the 
country; and they might finally know the truth, which 
might set them free. Anyhow, if education should fail, 
everything had failed: for this experiment in development 
by democracy seems the last one to be tried. 

So there was nothing left save an examination of this 
thing which we were trying imder the name of education 
as a means of grace for our declining life, in process of 



A POSTSCRIPT 8S 

ruin by latifundia as Rome was ruined. Once fairly ex- 
amined it was seen as nothing but a sham of an educational 
system, one which could never have been adopted had any 
thought been given to Education the Thing, rather than 
to Education the Word. And even in an era addicted 
to word-worship, it could never have been adopted had 
it not been established before modern science had been 
related to the everyday processes of rural living. 

Why, it suddenly became clear, rural life is Education. 
No other life makes imperative the doing of so many things 
the understanding of which is Education. . It is only by 
obstinately shutting our eyes to the meaning of things 
that we avoid a liberal education while making a living 
from the soil. This fact is proven by many, many cases, 
in which people who have gone through the ordinary sham 
courses of schools have found themselves unexpectedly 
gaining true culture through the effort to understand the 
everyday things, tasks and affairs of rural life. The farm, 
the garden, the orchard, the poultry-yard, the diseases and 
pests which infest the plants and animals, the competition 
of the various forms of life, the problems of the soil, the 
use of fertilizers, the marketing of products, the local gov- 
ernment, the transportation questions, co-operation, gov- 
ernmental relations to agriculture — why, the affairs of 
every school-neighborhood run out into multitudinous 
phases of science, art, literature, politics, history, geog- 
raphy, biology, entomology, zoology, ornithology. And in 
this sort of school these things are not mere branches of 
study taken up in order that credits may be gained for 
some promotion to higher schools which the pupils as a 



86 HERBERT QUICK 

rule will never attend. They are problems which pupils 
and parents vividly realize are related to the ever-present 
task of making a living. Such school processes are not 
preparations for life, they are life itself. They run out 
into the hours spent in the field and in the home, and they 
lap over into the vacations. They make every act of 
daily life an excursion into learning, a part of the school 
curriculum. They are not isolated studies of things se- 
lected from life because of their adaptability for use as 
illustrations of truths encountered in school, as analogous 
studies must always be in city schools; rather they are 
revelations of the educational value of almost everything 
touched by country life. They make of rural living a 
great book in which everything is registered which the 
city school can possibly touch, but which in the rural school 
is shot through with the absorbing interest stimulated by 
the recognition of the fact that these things must be under- 
stood if life is to be successful. And when this is seen, we 
come to see also that the complete education of a human 
being cannot be given in the city: that the farm itself is 
the best educational plant in the world ; that, given a few 
years of public attention to the rural school in recognition 
of this fact, and people of intelligence will begin to return 
to the country in order that their children may have better 
educational advantages than they can possibly have in the 
city; that by forgetting about preparation for college and 
university and studying their own problems as school exer- 
cises, the rurally-educated youth will become so clearly the 
superiors of their city cousins in everything which makes 
for excellence as students, that colleges and universities 



A POSTSCRIPT 87 

will for their own sakes so modify their requirements for 
admission as to let in these young people with the newer 
and better preparation, for the further prosecution of their 
investigations into truth. 

And after all, truth is all that matters. After all, 
the thing which I see in the future is a generation of people 
accustomed from early childhood to seek truth. When 
such a generation, trained in its recognition when found, 
and skilled in finding it, takes charge of the affairs of the 
world, I am sure that it will see the real enemies of civil- 
ization, and will solve the problems called to our attention 
so long ago in the baccalaureate sermon I have mentioned 
— " or we perish in our own prosperity! " 

And that is how " The Brown Mouse " came to be 
written. 

Herbert Quick 



CONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS OF THE NEW ERA; 
OR THE ROLE OF SCIENCE IN SOCIAL 
RECONSTRUCTION 

IT may be safely asserted that every scientific fact has 
an ethical value ; for everything in science, even to the 
determination of its concrete facts, lies within the lexism 
of human behavior. The continuity of influence may be 
readily traced from such beginnings even to such complex 
endings as the three great Cardinal Virtues of the New 
Era. These are Lawfulness, Service and Courage: Law- 
fulness in the sense of a determined purpose of each to con- 
form, and to insist that others shall conform, to the Law 
that lies deep in the nature of things and that makes for 
the welfare and happiness of all: Service in the sense of 
helping others to conform to the Law and thus to enjoy 
its blessings — not words, not mere sentiment, not mere 
feeling unexpressed and unacted, but service of real help- 
fulness, given unselfishly, blending benevolence, forgive- 
ness and forgetfulness with tenderness and gentleness and 
all of Love itself — but without the chill blast of charity ; 
Courage in the sense of doing and, if necessary, dying for 
the Law. These virtues came molten from the furnaces of 
War to form the stable structure of Peace. And Peace 
built upon them will most endure, for they are of the Law. 
It is important to a fair understanding that the relation- 
ship between Lexism and Science on the one hand, and 

88 



CONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS OF THE NEW ERA 89 

Religonism and Philosophy on the other, shall be rather 
more carefully considered. This may well be done by a 
brief survey of their similarities and their dissimilarities. 
Thus it may be accepted that, in motive and purpose, all 
stand alike consecrated to Truth, concrete truth and gen- 
eralized truth. They alike seek to know truth for Truth's 
sake. They are alike consciously in the service of hu- 
manity. 

At this point, however, their dissimilarities begin. Thus 
Religionism in the Occident is devoted to an understanding 
of the first cause of things; it is theistic; its fundamental 
conception is a personal God; it believes in revelation in 
the sense of a direct communication from God to and 
through some human agency; it has a system of rewards 
and punishments in a life after this life; its methods are 
subjective; it assumes the sufficiency and finality of the 
scriptures upon which its mission depends; and it claims 
to teach by authority of divine command. Philosophy, 
too, deals with first cause. It does this by ultimate ab- 
straction, which may or may not be theistic; its notion 
of revelation of the life to come and of rewards and pun- 
ishments varies with the philosophy under consideration; 
its methods involve a blending of the subjective and the 
objective tending to supergeneralization and ultimate 
abstraction. 

The ultimate abstractions of Philosophy embrace, in 
part: God, Deity, The Absolute, The Unknown, The 
Cause, The Creator, The Mystery, Power, The Being, 
Omnipotence, The Source, Perfect Mind, The Will, Su- 
preme Instance, Omniscience, The Infinite, The Almighty, 



90 C. A. L. REED 

The Finite God, The Current, The Summation, Absolute 
Will, Living All, The Captain, The Altogether; — strange 
things, Horatio ! 

It stands for its authority upon the intrinsic worth of 
its content. The individual philosophies generally ap- 
proach the solution of the great mystery from single 
angles; or by the attempted application of individual hy- 
potheses to all phenomena, especially the phenomena of 
human conduct; and, in spite of a general tone of finality, 
are necessarily fragmentary, out of harmony with the 
Law, and, consequently, self limiting in both application 
and duration. Science addresses itself to everything ex- 
istent; busies itself with relationships and the determi- 
nations of cause and effect; its methods involve the per- 
ception, accurate determmation and logical consideration 
of facts and their collation, correlation and generalization 
as expressions of the Law. At this point Science delivers 
its daily output to the arts and to ethics — and ethics in 
this sense is Lexism. 

It will be seen from this coup d^oeil, and from what has 
preceded, that Lexism has nothing to do with either first 
causes or final effects, with beginnings or endings, or with 
ultimate abstractions. It is, therefore, neither a religion 
nor a philosophy. It has no concern with pantheism, 
polythesim, monotheism, atheism, or any other theism. In 
the realm of the supernatural it affirms nothing, denies 
nothing, questions nothing, and is, therefore, not even 
agnostic. It does not seek to invade the infinite ; its field 
is the finite. It has nothing to do with the whence, why 
and whither, but everything to do with the which and 



CONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS OF THE NEW ERA 91 

the what J the here and now of things. In other words 
Lexism simply busies itself with the affairs of every-day 
life, with every-day life itself. It is not concerned with 
the problem of future existence which it leaves entirely in 
the hands of the religions. It equally avoids such recon- 
dite questions as the reasonableness of reason, the doubt- 
fulness of doubt, the thingness of things, likewise the 
whichness of the what, to say nothing of the whatness of 
the which. These are recognized as being among the 
more profound questions that naturally belong to certain 
philosophers of the metaphysical type and with whom, it 
is felt, they may be left with neither regret nor solicitude. 

Lexism is complete in the sense that all existence falls 
within its purview; but it is incomplete in the sense that it 
embraces only such knowledge as has been reduced to 
terms of the Law. It, therefore, unlike the religions and 
the philosophies, does not carry the pretension of finality, 
but is openly, frankly and of necessity progressive. On 
evidence it expunges from the record the accepted truth of 
yesterday as the demonstrated error of to-day, and on 
evidence adds to the record that which has to-day been 
proven true. It speaks by authority, the authority of 
knowledge — Truth — the Law — ascertained by meth- 
ods of accuracy, confirmed by experience and promul- 
gated by consensus. As the fundamental and determin- 
ing executive force in human behavior, in life itself, in 
existence outside of that which we call life, its 
mandates are imperative and admit neither of appeal nor 
of stay of execution. 

The present status and future mission of Lexism should 



92 C. A. L. REED 

be the subject of serious thought. In the first place, then, 
let it be understood that Lexism is neither a theoretic con- 
ception nor an academic proposal; on the contrary, Lexism 
was, even before the name, and is to-day, a fact — a 
breathing, pulsating, vibrant, vital fact — an actual func- 
tionating force, the most determining force in all human 
progress. Its subject matter is the dynamics of the 
universe, the kinematics of life itself. Based upon a con- 
tinuity of precepts that extends further back in time than 
any religion or any philosophy now extant, it has grown 
in volume, force and momentum until to-day, in essence 
and substance, it is being disseminated through every 
avenue of contemporaneous education and is irresistibly 
molding the conduct of the peoples. In the daily press 
and magazines, in books on education, science and philos- 
ophy, in casual conversation, there is constant reference 
to the " natural law," always more or less vague but 
always in the sense of inevitableness. In schools, colleges, 
and universities there is actual instruction in the " Natural 
Law," through whatever department of learning it may 
be manifested; it is recognized in the pulpits; and even 
the lawyers have come to recognize that there is a Law 
back of their law; while on every hand there may be ob- 
served a tendency, conscious, subconscious or unconscious, 
to adjust human conduct to the Natural Law — to the 
Law! — and this, again, is Lexism. Thus it will be seen 
that Lexism supplants no religion, no philosophy, but sup- 
plements and renders explicit the truth in all religions and 
all philosophies. It interferes with no man in his search 
for, and his contemplation of either the sublimest truth or 



^rtd 



CONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS OF THE NEW ERA 93 

the most celestial fancy; it even stimulates the most in- 
spiring of imagery; for even the Lexist may stand on 
the outer margin of the Known, gaze across the realm of 
the yet Unknown, into the void of the Unknowable, and, 
with the longings of love, the pigments of fancy, and the 
alchemy of faith, fashion it with beauty, fill it with light 
and color, suffuse it with zephyrs, people it with loved 
ones gone before, and in the midst of all, create in the 
image of perfection, the beloved Father before whom he 
bows in adoration! — but this is not Lexism. 

A further understanding of the present status of Lexism 
may be had in reply to the inquiry, who are Lexists? 
Broadly, all are Lexists who recognize the existence of the 
natural law — of the Law — and try to conform to its 
provisions; all who teach the Law, or any part of it, in 
school, college, or university, in the pulpit, on the plat- 
form, through the press, or in the daily walks and talks 
of life; all religionists who, in addition to their belief in 
God however conceived, recognize the existence of the 
Law in nature, however it may have come there, and that 
its observance is the observance of the will of their God; 
all philosophers who in addition to their other concepts, 
whatever they may be, embrace within their systems a 
recognition of the Law and its relation to phenomena, 
whether classified as physical, mental, or moral; all scien- 
tists who recognize that the chief aim of science is to re- 
veal the Law and reduce it to definite terms, and who rec- 
ognize in the Law thus revealed not only the chief means 
to material welfare, but in ethics, the only safe guide to 
health and happiness, to length and breadth of days. 



94 C. A. L. REED 

But if Lexism thus exists in essence, substance and 
effectiveness, without a name, why bother with the name? 
The question may be answered by another, or by several : 
Is not such a potentiaHty entitled to a name? Will not 
a name make it less vague, more definite, more recogniz- 
able, more voluntarily observable? Will not such defi- 
niteness lead to a declared following ; a following to organ- 
ization; to conscious existence; to conscious purpose; to 
conscious mission? If these questions are to be answered 
in the affirmative, and they will be thus answered, what 
is to be recognized as the rats on d'etre as the more immedi- 
ate and direct objects and purposes of the movement? 
Briefly they are: 

( 1 ) To promote recognition of the Law in all things, 

(2) To disseminate a knowledge of the terms of the 

Law as such, 

(3) To teach the relation of the Law to human 

behavior, 

(4) To encourage observance of the Law, 

(5) To stimulate the further revelation of the Law. 

(6) To perpetuate the names and thus insure the im- 

mortality of all who have made revelation of 
the Law. 

These principles and purposes, translated into the con- 
crete of action, imply the study of the Law not only by 
groups voluntarily organized for the purpose, but more 
especially by groups now being rapidly evolved in the nat- 
ural reintegration of society. The Law, interpreted and 
taught through organized Lexism, would be not an ab- 



CONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS OF THE NEW ERA 95 

stract something represented by strings of words and 
groups of phrases, but something to take home, think 
about, work with and live not only with but by, in the 
office, the shop, the factory, in the schoolroom, on the 
farm, and by the evening fireside. This policy would mean 
the exposition of The Law, not so much by preachment as 
by exemplification. A possible Science Director for the 
community, one properly qualified, properly compensated, 
and properly sustained in a moral sense, falls within this 
purview. But such groups would also become tangible 
and effective agencies for the promotion of the public 
schools, colleges and universities and their protection 
against sinister influences. They would, furthermore, be 
active influences by which the whole teaching profession 
would be made more attractive, its material rewards en- 
hanced, its personnel consequently improved, its effective- 
ness increased and its general status, intellectual and so- 
cial, be made more exalted. The power inherent in such a 
movement would operate to the higher appreciation and 
better reward of technical attainment professionally em- 
ployed in the utilitarian application of the Law. Such or- 
ganization would afford opportunity to stimulate further 
Revelation by the canonization of those who have already 
made revelations of the Law. To illustrate, the lives and 
achievements of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle and Soc- 
rates; of Copernicus, da Vinci, Galileo, and Kepler; of 
Hippocrates, Vesalius, Harvey and Jenner; of Pascal, 
Newton, Leibnitz, Halley and Franklin; of Lamarck, Dar- 
win, Wallace and Mendel; of Pasteur, Lister and Koch, 
and of hundreds of others, may well be celebrated on days 



96 C. A. L. REED 

set apart on the calendar. In this way those who have best 
served humanity as Revealers of The Law, and others 
who may follow them in the cause of Truth, will be as- 
sured an actual and tangible Immortality, the immortal- 
ity of men, by men, among men on earth. Mankind 
would thus be given more consciously the benefit of their 
genius as well as the inspiration of their example. And, 
through the organized influence thus made effective, 
foundations may be laid and necessary substantial sup- 
port be given for the promotion of research. Lexism 
thus made corporate, would naturally become an effective 
instrumentality for the support of all government in its 
progressive evolution to the standard of The Law. But 
above all the object and purpose, the slogan, of organized 
Lexism must be, — " Carry the Message to the Masses! " 
The duty is imperative, Man is of to-day. The future is 
always ahead of him. In the to-day, when creeds have 
failed, when doubt and uncertainty reign, let him turn to 
kindly Nature, of which he is a part, learn her Law, obey 
her mandates and thus secure for himself the blessings 
of health, strength, liberty and the joy of existence. The 
future will take care of itself — and of Man. The Law, 
the same unchanging Law which has operated through all 
time, will still continue its all-enfolding embrace and we 
may depart, as we came, secure in the knowledge that all 
is well with us as it has been with the countless millions 
who have gone before, and as it will be for the vast pro- 
cession of mankind who will follow us. 

Charles A. L. Reed 



JUVENAL ON EDUCATION 

JUVENAL'S picture of the education of Roman youth 
is vivid enough to bear out what we learn from Quin- 
tilian^ and others about Roman education from Repub- 
lican days, and adds enough to let us see the condition of 
affairs early in the Second Century of the Christian Era, 
Hadrian's reign. 

We know that the child learned Roman probity and 
manners at home for the first seven years of his life, 
watched over especially by his mother and his nurse, with 
his father's eye upon them all; after seven, the boy was 
his father's constant companion at home and abroad, lis- 
tening to his conversation with his friends and to his busi- 
ness, except during the time he spent at school, while the 
girl learned household arts from her mother. 

The schools, like all else in Rome, began at daybreak, 
and the children were conducted thither by an elderly 
slave who watched their steps and their manners, and car- 
ried their books and their lanterns, since it was still dark 
when they left home. 

In the lowest school, the litterator taught the rudiments, 
a little later the grammaticus taught the elements of liter- 
ature and composition, and later still the rhetor practised 
his pupils in the art of advanced composition and dec- 
lamation. 

1 Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, De Institutione Oratoria. 

97 



98 HELEN H. TANZER 

Girls might go to school as well as boys, and some 
fathers employed private teachers instead of sending the 
children to school. 

In the elementary schools the children learned the three 
R,^s; there was very little in the way of arithmetic, and 
their reading and writing were first simply the forming 
of letters, and then learning to write from dictation such 
things as the proverbs and gnomic wisdom of the reading 
lesson provided, in addition to the laws of the Twelve 
Tables. 

The siiasoriae were the chief exercises in the grammar 
schools. They were what we should call compositions 
based on passages in the children's reading of Vergil or 
Horace or Cato or some other Roman writer, or perhaps 
on incidents in history, in which the youthful authors rep- 
resented a character as defending his action or as explain- 
ing it. Hannibal, for instance, was a favorite, and he was 
made to explain what causes actuated him in his campaign 
against the Romans. 

In the school of rhetoric the study of literature was ex- 
tended to include Greek authors and the compositions 
were, besides advanced suasoriae, a new kind, called con- 
troversiae. This was in the nature of a criticism of an 
action, such as, for instance, pointing out to Caesar that 
his crossing of the Rubicon was not the best thing to do 
under the circumstances, and suggesting a better plan. 
Both of these exercises remind us of the subjects so pop- 
ular in modern times in debating societies, where knowl- 
edge after the fact changes the point of view and the time 



JUVENAL ON EDUCATION 99 

that has elapsed since the subject was first discussed 
makes it perfectly safe to disagree or to find fault. 

Decius Junius Juvenalis devotes one third of one Satire 
and one half of another to criticizing the conditions of his 
day in regard to education, and in sternly rebuking fathers 
for setting bad examples to their children. In addition 
there are many passages scattered through the sixteen 
Satires which throw light on the customs of the times 
Most of these speak for themselves. 

The theme of Satire XIV is the force of example and 
hence the importance of fathers setting good examples 
for the children to follow. " There are many things," 
he says, " deserving of condemnation which parents them- 
selves teach to their children." ^ If the father gambles, 
the youth will do likewise, even while still a child. If the 
father is a glutton, the child will copy him, and though 
you put a thousand bearded schoolmasters on either side 
of the boy at seven (and after) to teach him to be ab- 
stemious, the youth who has constantly before him the 
bad example of an extravagant father will still prefer 
extravagance. 

Or, if a father is cruel to slaves ^ in the presence of his 
children, can he expect the children to learn to be kind and 
gentle? Juvenal asks. 

The poet goes on to say that the children should be 
allowed to see nothing from which they might learn any- 
thing harmful, and it is here that we find the famous line 

2 XIV, 1-14: Plurima sunt . . . quae monstrant ipsi pueris 
traduntque parentes, etc. 

3 XIV, 15-24. 



'^■^-^•^- -• '• • • '" — N,-^ ^-« ^.v-ia^*. 



100 HELEN H. TANZER 

(XIV. 47) "Maxima debetur puero reverentia " — 
" the greatest reverence is due to youth." 
. Juvenal takes up, one after another, all the great vices 
of his times and treats them with scorn. It is a law of 
nature, he says, that the young should take after their 
elders, and learn what is good or bad from them. In 
former times fathers taught their sons to care for probity, 
but now they only teach them how to get rich, since no 
one asks whence your wealth comes if only you have it. 
This lesson, Juvenal says, little boys learn from their 
nurses and little girls know before they learn their letters : 
(XIV. 209) '' Hoc discunt omnes ante Alpha et Beta 
puellae." Indeed, they are so good at learning these early 
lessons that the pupil (discipulus) will outstrip the master 
(magister), and when your son is grown he will cheat you 
also, the father is admonished. 

The ''Alpha et Beta " refers to the activities of the Indus 
or elementary school, while the " bearded schoolmasters " 
inculcating moral lessons (XIV. 1 2 ) were the teachers in 
the grammar school. It was here that the rudiments of 
grammar were taught (VI. 452, and VII. 215), the rules 
of which were learned by heart, and the children wrote 
and declaimed suasoriae.^ Corporal punishment was not 
unknown, and we find mention of the rod, though Juvenal 
does not tell ' us what misdeeds caused hands to be held 
out for the application of it. The teacher sat in a high 
chair ^ (cathedra) while the children stood before him and 

* Juvenal I. 16; cf. also Quintilian, Inst. III. 8. 
^ I. 15: et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus. 
6 VII. 203. 



JUVENAL ON EDUCATION lOi 

read aloud from Horace and Vergil ^ all blackened from 
the smoke of their lanterns, the smell from which Juvenal 
considers not the least of the teacher's troubles. And 
since each boy had a lamp it may not be only the poet's 
exaggeration when he says that nothing would induce him 
to spend his nights and early mornings in an atmosphere 
no blacksmith or weaver could stand. ^ 

Another difficulty for the teachers was the fact that the 
parents expected them to be very well prepared, and 
learned in the smallest details of grammar/ history, and 
mythology, and to watch over the children's behavior with 
the greatest attention, only to pay them at the end of the 
year ^^ no more than public acclaim gave to a victor in the 
circus or the ampi theatre. 

The schools for rhetoric, which were the most advanced, 
the pupils attended usually from their twelfth to about 
their sixteenth or seventeenth year. Controversiae or 
arguments based on something in their reading of litera- 
ture or history was the chief kind of composition practiced, 
and Juvenal pities the poor teacher who has to listen to his 
classes slaying dread tyrants ^^ or advising Sulla to save 
himself from an early death by retiring from political 
activity .^^ There was not much variety in the choice of 
subjects. 

Declamation was the other important subject of study 

7 VII. 227. 

8 VII. 223. 

9 VII. 230 ff. 

10 VII. 243. 

11 VII. 150 ff: Declamare doces: o ferrea pectora Vetti, cum perimit 
saevos classis numerosa tyrannos. 

12 I. 16: et nos consilium dedimus SuUae, privatus ut altum dormiret. 



102 HELEN H. TANZER 

in the schools of rhetoric. The students recited speeches 
which had been written for the purpose or else selections 
from great authors. These pieces were practiced with the 
intention of reciting them on public exhibition days (cf. 
Persius, Satires, III. 47) and necessitated frequent repe- 
tition with appropriate gestures. The class stood while 
practicing their speeches, and instead of pitying the 
teacher for having to take such pains with stupid boys that 
one would think, as Juvenal does, that he would die of 
weariness, we might pity the boys whose ambition led 
them to try again and again in the hope of mastering the 
art of the orator and all his tricks. Except of course that 
if a boy learned to be an orator he would then plead 
real cases and become a lawyer, a profession that paid far 
better than the teacher's, and carried with it the prospect 
of political advancement. 

There was no reason why girls should not attend these 
schools as well as boys, though it seems more probable 
that they had private teachers after the grammar schools 
especially when we remember that the age for marriage 
for a girl was from twelve to sixteen. But there is no 
doubt that women were educated, and Juvenal's contri- 
bution to this point is his diatribe against bluestockings.^^ 
Whether he really hated learning in women or only ob- 
jected to one who monopolized the conversation to show 
off her knowledge of grammar and her skill in discussing 
literary questions, it is hard to decide He certainly thinks 
that a husband ought to be allowed to make a mistake in 
grammar! '' Soloecismum liceat fecisse marito." 

13 VI. 434-456. 



JUVENAL ON EDUCATION 103 

And many people even to-day will echo Juvenal's regret 
at the lack of respect shown to teachers in his own day 
(and later), and sigh for the good old days when the 
teacher was regarded as being '^ in loco parentis." ^* 

Helen H. Tanzei^ 

1^ VII. 209. 



THE ROMAN STONE 

(Red Porphyry) 

EVERYONE — at least, every tourist in Rome — has 
read the boast of Augustus, now hackneyed by much 
quotation, that he had found Rome built of brick, and had 
left it built of marble/ But, as Arthur Hugh Clough, the 
poet, impHes, something here needs further explanation: 

" Brick-work I found thee and marble I left thee," 

boasteth Augustus. 
" Marble I thought thee and brick-work I find thee," 

exclaimeth the tourist. 

Certainly a large part of the visible ruins in Rome seem 
made of brick, and not of marble. But when the 
tourist is told that the brick- work before Augustus' day 
was mostly sun-dried brick of which no trace now remains, 
and, further, that the bricks which he sees on all sides have 
no organic connection, for the most part, with the building 
in which they are used,^ the mystery only deepens as far 
as bricks are concerned. No^ is the case clearer as to 
marbles. He will be told on the one hand that Rome is 
richer in this material than any other city not built in the 

^ Suetonius, Vita Aug. XXVIII. 3, Marmoream se relinquere quam 
latericiam accepisset. 

2 Middleton, Remains of Ancient Rome, I, p. 11, "The existing ex- 
amples of brick in Rome are used merely as facing to concrete walls; 
no wall is ever of solid brick." 

104 



THE ROMAN STONE 105 

immediate vicinity of quarries ^ ; on the other hand, that 
with a few exceptions no Roman building was constructed 
of solid marble. The tourist will probably conclude that 
the art of building in Rome was a series of puzzles. 

The explanation of the last statement is, of course, very 
simple. Marble and similar materials were, speak- 
ing broadly, simply ornamental. The arch, the vault, 
the dome, — in other words, the most characteristic de- 
velopments of Roman architecture, — in constructive 
principle and practical application owed nothing to any 
quality of marble. It was the very homely and generally 
unnoticed concrete that enabled the engineer to pile arch 
on arch, to superimpose order on order, for the erection of 
a Coliseum, or to throw his dome recklessly across the air 
from wall to wall of a Pantheon. To all this the marble 
was simply a glorified surface covering, — the trimmings 
on the dress, whose fit and durability were due to quite 
other fabrics. 

But what magnificent trimmings 1 What other material 
could more impressively, more fittingly, have symbolized 
the enormous wealth, the insatiable love of splendor and 
display, the pride, the power, the luxury of imperial Rome, 
than the rare and lovely stones with which she incrusted 
and adorned her buildings. The story of Roman infatu- 
ation for such material is an amazing tale. For five centu- 
ries the known world was ransacked for stones. Basalts, 
and granites, and alabasters from Egypt; granite from 
Elba and Sardinia; purple marble from Asia, reds and 
blacks from Sparta, yellow from Africa, white from Paros 

3 H. W. PuUen, Handbook of Ancient Roman Marbles, p. 5. 



I06 G. M. WHICHER 

and the other ^gean isles; verde antico from Thessaly; 
breccias from Spain, from Epirus — not to speak of the 
masses brought from Luna near at hand. All these and 
many others were quarried, sawed, carved, and brought 
to Rome in incredible quantities, cluttering her wharves 
and blocking her streets, all to adorn the surface of her 
houses and minister to her frantic love of display.* 

Horace, who saw the beginnings of this passion, speaks, 
as his readers will remember, with deprecation of the 
Phrygian stone, Hymettian marble, and columns hewn in 
far-off Africa. Later moralists often mention it as one 
of the most characteristic displays of ostentatious wealth. 
The elder Pliny stigmatizes it as a vice, and rebukes it 
in his most rhetorical style: 

" It now remains for us to speak of stones," he writes at the 
opening of his thirty-sixth book, " the leading jolly of the day. . . . 
As to the mountains, Nature has made these for herself as a kind 
of bulwark for keeping together the framework of the earth. . . . 
And yet we, forsooth, must hew down these mountains and carry 
them off for no other reason than to gratify our luxurious inclina- 
tions. Promontories are thrown open to the sea and the face of 
Nature is being everywhere reduced to a level. We carry away the 
barriers that were destined for the separation of one nation from 
another; we construct ships for the transport of our marbles, and 
amid the very waves we convey the summits of the mountains to 
and fro. . . . For what utility or for what so-called pleasure do 
mortals make themselves the agents, or more truly speaking, the 
victims of such undertakings, except in order that others may take 
their repose in the midst of variegated stones." 

Among all these materials sought for with such eager- 
ness there is one which may be regarded as a good type. 

* Lanciani, Destruction of Ancient Rome, passim. 



THE ROMAN STONE 107 

It came from a great distance from Rome ; it was quarried 
and transported with the utmost difficulty; it was ex- 
traordinarily hard to work; and by a strange freak of 
fortune its very color associated it with those ancient 
traditions of kingly and tyrannical power which were re- 
vived and realized by the Empire. It is no cause for sur- 
prise then that the purple porphyry of Egypt, the porfido 
rosso of the Roman scalpellini, came at last to be known 
as the Lapis Romanus, the Roman stone in the most char- 
acteristic sense. 

This name was not, indeed, applied to it at first. It 
is distinctly post-classical. Pliny in his chapter on stones 
speaks of it as porphyrites, and other classical writers 
generally use some epithet referring to its color.^ While 
its hue varies somewhat — there are darker and lighter 
species — its characteristic color is a deep purplish red, 
the surface when polished being irregularly spotted with 
pinkish-white crystals, more or less rectangular in shape. 
No one ever has much trouble in identifying it after once 
seeing it, and so widely does it occur and so intimately 
is it associated with the " Grandeur that was Rome," 
that no visitor to the Eternal City, no matter how 
unarchaeological he may be, should fail to makes its 
acquaintance and know some of the very interesting facts 
of its amazing history. 

The name Lapis Romanus (Roman Stone) occurs only 
very late. Faustino Corsi, whose book on marbles and 
other building stones, written one hundred years ago, still 
serves as the point of departure for most essays on these 

^ E. g. Lucan, Pharsalia, X, 116. purpureas lapis. 



I08 G. M. WHICHER 

subjects, quotes from Codinus,^ a writer of late Byzantine 
times, the letter of a Roman lady named Marcia, in which 
she informs the Emperor Justinian that she has sent 
him eight '^ Roman columns "' to adorn the church of St. 
Sophia at Constantinople. Corsi quotes also a second 
writer, Cedrenus,^ who says that Constantine was buried 
in a coffin of " porphyry or Roman stone." 

And Constantine Porphyrogennetus,^ speaking of a vase, 
says that it was formed of " Egyptian stone, which now 
we call Roman." Well does it deserve the name ! Every 
fact about it — its source, its transport, its working, its 
use — exhibits in the most vivid form the love — the 
mania, one may justly call it — of the Romans for costly 
materials. To begin with, the quarries which supplied it 
were in the region east of the Nile, a site about as far off 
from Rome as the then known world could present, and 
rendered still more nearly inaccessible by the desert which 
surrounded it, the scarcity of water, and the fierce heat of 
its climate. Just where the Gulf of Suez joins the Red 
Sea there lies on the African Coast a small harbor, which 
in the days of Strabo the geographer was one of the most 
important ports for trade with the far East. It was said 
to have been founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus, who 
reigned in Egypt in the third century b.c. The Greek 
name of the port was Myos Hormos — " Mussel Harbor." 
From this point a caravan route strikes southwestward 

6 Codinus, De Origine Constantino p., p. 65. He wrote toward the 
end of the Byzantine empire. 

'' In his Compendium of History, written at the end of the eleventh 
or the beginning of the twelfth century. 

8 Emperor at Constantinople, 917-959 a.d. 



THE ROMAN STONE 109 

and, after some hundred miles of desert waste, reaches the 
Nile near Coptos, not far from the site of ancient Thebes. 
Along this route, difficult and dangerous, and inconven- 
ient as it must have been, trade with the Orient was car- 
ried on, in preference to seeking an outlet through the 
Gulf of Suez and across the sandy isthmus. 

About twenty-five miles inland from Myos Hormos 
a range of mountains in places about 4000 feet high runs 
north and south, and here, in the form of a huge horse- 
shoe-shaped dyke of extended rock, lies a ridge that is 
practically a mass of red porphyry. It was from this 
desolate corner of a torrid desert that the Romans ob- 
tained it, and, as far as we know, from no other spot. 

It is commonly said that the early Eg3T>tians did not 
know of these quarries. Certainly, for some reason that 
is not apparent, they made very little use of this material. 
Yet even in Pre-dynastic times the artisans of Egypt, 
like primitive man in many parts of the world, were able 
to work with amazing skill the most stubborn material, 
and they could hardly have been deterred from using 
porphyry by its hardness alone. Yet scholars in the Egyp- 
tian Department of the Metropolitan Museum in New 
York could produce only the scantiest references to the 
material in the literature of Egyptology. Some amulets 
from the Pre-dynastic period, and a fluted bowl or two 
from the Old Kingdom, are the only objects of which they 
can find certain mention. 

Weigall in his Travels in the Upper Egyptian Desert, 
(ch. IV, p. 109) states: " This purple porphyry was not 
known to the ancient Egyptians; a Roman prospector 



no G. M. WHICHER 

must have searched the desert to find it." But that matter 
probably will bear further investigation. One suggestion 
on this subject I quote for its interest, without endorsing 
it: Schneider/ whose monograph on Porphyry is by all 
odds the most extensive treatment on the subject, suggests 
that the purple stone was thought to bear too close a 
resemblance to the clotted blood of the typhon Set, the 
slayer of Osiris, the subject of a story in Egyptian myth- 
ology. And he thinks, therefore, that superstitious 
scruples led the early Egyptians to refrain from using 
the stone except in a few instances. 

Whether it was really reserved for a Roman prospector 
to discover the porphyry quarries, or whether they were 
opened and used in the Hellenized Egypt of the Ptolemies, 
are other questions that still await an answer. More prob- 
ably the latter statement is correct. The few objects 
mentioned above show that the material was known in 
early Egypt. The quarries, situated on a prominent trade 
route, could hardly elude observation. With the growth 
of luxury in Alexandria and the increased desire for costly 
and beautiful building materials, these quarries were prob- 
ably put into requisition. 

One conspicuous use of red porphyry has been, and for 
that matter, still is, its employment with white marble and 
other materials in small pieces, for the pavements of 
temples and churches, — the so-called Opus Alexandria 
num. The name has been thought to be derived from the 
Emperor Alexander Severus, but a much more likely 

^ Oskar Schneider, N aturwissenschajtliche Beitrdge Zur Geographie 
und Kulturgeschichte. Dresden: Bleyl iind Kaemmer, 1883. 



THE ROMAN STONE m 

source is the name of the Egyptian capital itself. One 
may hazard the conjecture that it was from the gay and 
luxury-loving Alexandrians that Rome imbibed some of 
her passion for expensive building materials. And she 
probably found there works of art and architectural orna- 
ments made of red porphyry. 

The material was always relatively expensive at Rome, 
and it seems from the first to have been an imperial mo- 
nopoly. As was the case with several of the marbles, the 
porphyry trade was organized and placed in charge of a 
governmental office. There were superintendents and 
agents and their subordinates, with their appropriate 
titles, some of which are preserved to us in inscriptions. 
There were guards of soldiers, and gangs of slaves; roads 
were built across the desert and ships provided to trans- 
port the produce of the quarries to Rome. Just when the 
Romans first had their attention directed to it has been a 
matter of debate. Pliny (XXXV, ii) remarks: 

Vitrasius Pollio, who was procurator of Egypt for the Emperor 
Claudius, brought to Rome some statues made of this stone; a 
novelty which was not very highly approved of, as no one has since 
followed his example. 

This is the earliest reference we have to porphyry. On 
the face of it the reference is to statues only, and many of 
us would echo the censure of the critics in Rome. It is not 
a pleasing material for statuary. The later Romans, with 
more degenerate taste, used it for statues not infrequently, 
and their example was followed in Renaissance times. 

But does this statement of Pliny mean that the Romans 
before his day had made no use of porphyry at all? There 



112 G. M. WHICHER 

is the point of debate. It seems to me that they almost 
certainly did know of its use in other ways, and I think 
that there is evidence in Rome to prove it. But that is 
another story. 

In another fifty years from Pliny's day we have proof 
that it was used in architecture, though evidently an un- 
usual luxury. An interesting story is told by the biogra- 
pher of Antoninus Pius to illustrate that emperor's mild- 
ness of disposition: 

When he was visiting the house of Omulus, he noticed with sur- 
prise some porphyry columns, and asked whence they had been 
obtained. Omulus replied: "When you come into another man's 
house, you ought to be deaf and dumb." And the Emperor received 
this reply without resentment.^^ 

The point of the Emperor's question was the fact that 
the quarries were imperial property, and Omulus had ob- 
tained the columns without proper authorization. The 
anecdote shows, moreover, that the material was still re- 
garded as a costly rarity, — too much so for the house 
of a private citizen. 

For three or four centuries at least this organization 
kept up a steady supply of this much-admired stone from 
the distant corner of the Egyptian desert to the all-exact- 
ing Mistress of the World on the banks of the Tiber. Em- 
perors vied with their predecessors, and each strove to 
make a more extravagant use of this rare and costly stuff. 
Statues, on an ever-increasing scale of size, — and, to 

^^ Julius Capitolinus : Vita Anton. Pii — Quum domum Omuli visens 
miransque columnas porphyreticas requisisset unde eas haberet, atque 
Omulus ei dixisset quum in domum alienam veneris, et mutus at surdus 
esto, — patienter tulit. 



THE ROMAN STONE 1 13 

many tastes, of increasing ugliness; — sarcophagi; vases, 
and basins; gigantic bath-tubs and fountains; rosettes 
and plaques and mouldings for architectural ornaments; 
and then columns, monolithic or made of huge drums. 
Nothing was too grandiose for these masters of the world, 
who used the stone regardless of the expenditure of treas- 
ure and the cost in toil and tears and blood of their 
subjects. 

When the seat of empire was transferred to Constanti- 
nople, Rome was plundered of her art treasures to adorn 
the new capital, and among the most desired objects were 
those made of porphyry. Reference has already been 
made to the columns sent by the Lady Marcia; they were 
said to have been taken from the temple of the Sun erected 
by the Emperor Valerian. And this is only one example 
out of a thousand acts of pillage. 

In the succeeding centuries this example of plunder was 
followed for the benefit of other cities. Columns and 
other objects of porphyry were carried to Ravenna, Pa- 
lermo, Venice, Naples, and the smaller towns of Italy. 
Few cities of the Mediterranean lands did not secure some 
specimens; some of which have an interesting history of 
wandering. Objects made of this material have been 
found in Roman ruins in Africa, Spain and Gaul.^^ In 
modern times it has been carried still more widely afield. 
A notable collection of porphyry statues, vases, busts, pil- 
lars and other objects is described by Schneider as having 
been made at Potsdam by a Prussian Prince. Nearly 
every capital in Europe has some pieces of the material, in 

^^ But not, it is said, in Britain. 



114 ^' ^- WHICHER 

church or palace or museum. Even America has speci- 
mens. I have a note of some busts in the Boston Museum 
and the Metropolitan; two large slabs and two slender 
columns in the library of Mr. J. P. Morgan in New York 
City; and a large sarcophagus (originally, no doubt, a 
bath-tub in a Roman bath!) which is said to be in the 
Morgan Memorial Museum at Hartford, Connecticut. 
And all this material, so far as known, was brought out 
from Egypt under Roman supervision in Roman times. 

After the downfall of the Western Empire and the con- 
quest of Egypt by the Arabs the quarries ceased to be 
worked. Their very location was forgotten for centuries, 
though the tradition of an Egyptian origin seems never 
to have been lost. All through the Middle Ages and the 
Renaissance and even in modern times the demand for 
porphyry has been met by plundering the ruins of Rome. 
Her palaces and temples and porticoes have furnished the 
supply visible to every observant eye in Rome. Columns, 
like the gigantic pair that hold up the triumphal arch in 
S. Chrysogono, or the beautifully polished pillars of the 
baldacchino in S. Pancrazio, or the two that so exquisitely 
frame the bronze doors, with their lovely patination, of 
SS. Cosma and Damiano, looking out upon the Forum. 
Again, we find it in the shape of circular slabs, one of the 
elements in the gorgeous patterns of old pavements, such 
as delight the beholder in Santa Maria in Trastevere and 
many another venerable basilica. 

Yet after all these centuries of cutting and sawing and 
breaking and filing and fitting, Corsi, one hundred years 
ago, could count in Rome 156 columns of this material 
still intact ! 



THE ROMAN STONE 1 15 

But let us turn our attention again to the quarries. The 
first mention of them occurs in PHny. A century later 
the geographer Ptolemy (IV. 5) gives the situation of 
Mons Porphyrites or Mons Claudianus as in 26° 40', 
northeast of the Nile. 

In the time of Antoninus Pius, Aristides states that the 
quarries were in Arabia, i.e., east of the Nile, and in a 
region so destitute of water that the condemned criminals 
working them did not need to be watched. Life there was 
an ever enduring process of being burned! 

Gradually the knowledge of the place was completely 
lost. Rozier (Description de I'Egypte), one of the sa- 
vants who accompanied Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, 
states that the position of the porphyry quarries was still 
unknown. One of his own guesses, however, came near 
the truth. 

They were finally discovered by the English travelers. 
Burton and Wilkinson, in 1822. The best report of the 
discovery is given in the Journal of the Royal Geographical 
Society of London in the volume for 1832. The site was 
visited a short time afterwards by the German Schwein- 
furth, who made a careful survey of it, of which Schneider 
gives a full resume. Of later visitors I can find no record 
until, about forty years ago, a Mr. Brindley of London, 
an architect, conceived the idea of re-opening the quarries 
and made a visit of inspection. His report was given 
November 20, 1887, before the British Institute of Archi- 
tecture. Wilkinson records that on May 6, 1823, they 
had the satisfaction of coming upon ruins of some extent 
and realized that they were viewing the vast quarries 



Il6 G. M. WHICHER 

from which the Romans took so many superb pieces of 
porphyry. It had evidently been a mihtary station; there 
were ruins of barracks for soldiers and houses for the 
officers; scattered houses, perhaps for workmen. Work- 
shops, storehouses, one or two temples; two wells, one of 
fifteen feet in diameter, sunk in the solid porphyry rock, 
thirty-eight feet of depth being still visible. Inscriptions 
were found, in Greek, but of Roman subject matter; those 
quoted were of the time of Hadrian. Nothing was found 
to indicate that the quarries had been worked before the 
Romans took them in hand. Abundant traces of their 
work were scattered around. One unfinished column was 
found, more than 20 feet long and 3^ feet in diameter. 
Quantities of chips indicated that large blocks were 
roughly dressed into shape at the quarries, precisely as 
is done now, and for the same object of facilitating trans- 
port. The blocks were evidently quarried high on the 
slopes and lowered on sledges over paths prepared for 
the purpose, a process which in the marble quarries of 
Carrara is to-day called lizzatura. 

" Some marks on the blocks," writes Wilkinson, " seem to indi- 
cate the number of stones cut by each workman ; and that the men 
who worked here were condemned to complete a certain quantity 
of work, according to the offense for which they were sentenced; 
for nothing can induce me to think that any men but those who 
were condemned to do this labor would ever endure the heat." ^^ 

It is amusing to note that Brindley, who was interested 
in re-opening the quarries, states that the stone might be 

^2 In the above account, and elsewhere, I have used material given 
in the convenient hand-book by Miss Mary W. Porter: What Rome 
Was Built With. 



THE ROM.\N STONE 1 17 

quarried with comparative ease, and expresses the opinion 
that the heat is not so unbearable after all. 

To be condemned to the quarries, ad metalla, in Roman 
times was regarded as almost equivalent to a sentence 
of death. The worst of slaves and desperate criminals 
were sent to this hopeless end, and it is commonly believed 
that in the days of persecutions many Christians were con- 
demned to the same fate.^^ The interesting old church of 
the Santi Quattro Coronati still preserves the memory of 
the workers in stone, who according to the narrative of 
their Passio were condemned for their faith in Christ to 
the porphyry quarries of Pannonia! Probably a mistake 
for Africa. By divine power they were enabled to excel in 
carving the difficult material into the various shapes de- 
manded, — vases, bowls, and architectural ornaments, — 
so much so that they were set to work at the harder task 
of carving statues of the gods. But this they refused to 
do and paid for their firmness with their death. The little 
Capella di San Silvestro in the church is most appropri- 
ately, therefore, in the possession of the scalpellini or 
stone workers of Rome, one of the oldest guilds in the city. 
Except for the miraculous skill spoken of in the legend, 
the least credulous can hardly find reason for doubting 
the probability of the story, and it certainly adds to our 
interest in this wonderful stone to associate it with the 
^' blood of the martyrs which was the seed of the church." 

Undoubtedly, as this narrative implies, the working of 

•^3 Eusebius {De Mart. Palaest. viii. I.) is quoted by Bliimner as 
authority for the statement that countless Christians were busy in the 
porphyry quarries of the Thebais. This was, as stated above, the point 
on the Nile to which the stone was transported from the quarries. 



Il8 G. M. WHICHER 

this Stone is a matter of great toil. Like all minerals made 
up largely of silicon it is extremely hard. My geological 
colleague after testing it reported it nearly as hard as 
glass, and the best of tools are quickly blunted on its 
surface. We are told that the huge sarcophagus now 
standing in the Sala a Croce Greca of the Vatican Museum 
(a block 13 feet high by 8 feet long) was originally the 
coffin of the Empress Helena and was found in her tomb 
at the Torre Pignattara on the ancient Via Labicana. An- 
astasius IV in 11 54 moved it to the Lateran to serve as his 
own sarcophagus, and it was placed near the Porta Santa. 
In 1 600 when the Basilica was undergoing repairs the sar- 
cophagus was broken, and Pius VII in the early nineteenth 
century had it moved to the Vatican and repaired. The 
story now told is that it required twenty-five skilled work- 
men for twenty-five years to restore it, and that the cost 
of the work was over $90,000. 

One need not take these figures too seriously; but there 
is no doubt that the material is hard to work. As 
usual, it has been imagined that the ancients had some 
secret art by which they accomplished the work more 
easily than it can now be done. Vasari in the Introduction 
to his Lives gives an interesting account of experiments 
carried on in his day, when (so he states) the artists, even 
the great Michaelangelo, were quite unable to make 
statues of porphyry and only with great difficulty did any- 
thing with it. Before that time, he remarks, a certain 
Leon Battista Alberti had done wonders by tempering 
his tools in a bath of goat's blood, and some workers 
employed this recipe in Vasari 's day! But Duke Cosimo 



THE ROMAN STONE 119 

de Medici had made a profound study of the matter. By 
preparing a bath from the extracts of certain secret herbs 
he could so temper tools that one Francesco del Tadda, 
a carver of Fiesole, had succeeded in executing important 
works in this stubborn material. 

Winckelmann in the eighteenth century makes practi- 
cally the same statement, namely, that the art of working 
porphyry had been lost. He even thought that the famous 
sarcophagi of the Norman kings of Sicily, now in the 
Cathedral of Palermo, were of ancient Roman work, and 
he could not believe, what is now the common opinion, 
that they were made in the Middle Ages. 

It is apparent to anyone who examines the extant mon- 
uments that it is a mistake to believe that the art of work- 
ing porphyry has ever been totally lost. In most genera- 
tions some one has been found ambitious enough to under- 
take the task of working it, and patient enough to accom- 
plish it. From Winckelmann's own age there is at least 
one monument, easily visited, which disproves his theory. 
A wall tomb in the north aisle of Santa Maria, del Popolo, 
dated 1751, has a noteworthy piece of carved porphyry. 
There the sculptor has shown his skill — or his scalpel- 
lino's — by treating the stone as a plastic material, and 
has flung against the wall a curtain of many folds cut 
from this stubborn stone. 

It would be too long a tale to attempt even to name the 
many famous monuments made of porphyry, or even to 
mention the most interesting pieces that remain, some of 
which have had a long and varied history. Yet it is worth 
while to call attention to one of its unique uses. 



120 G. M. WHICHER 

Schneider states that the circular slabs of porphyry still 
seen in so many of the beautiful old pavements of 
churches in Rome, are representatives of an old custom of 
placing such slabs at points which would be occupied by 
dignitaries at significant moments in the ritual. Doubtless 
most of those now visible were located for purely decora- 
tive reasons, but there are some facts and traditions which 
seem to hint at the reality of such a theory. From such 
a porphyry disk in the chamber of a well-known ecclesi- 
astical court it derived its name of Rota. Even the guide 
books call attention to the slab within the entrance of 
St. Peter's, and repeat the statement that Charlemagne 
and later emperors knelt on it when being crowned by 
the Pope. Tradition not infrequently connects a piece 
of the stone with famous events, as, for instance, the rec- 
tangular slab still preserved in the wall of the cloisters 
at St. John Lateran with the inscription stating that on it 
the soldiers had cast lots for the garments of Christ. 

At Constantinople, we are told, the stone was inti- 
mately associated with imperial power and dignity. The 
very highest officials sat on thrones carved from it or stood 
on ceremonial occasions on slabs sawed from blocks or 
columns of porphyry. It is even written that when the 
Byzantine empress was about to become a mother, she 
repaired to a special room adorned with slabs of it, and 
only those members of the imperial family — so the tale 
runs — were accounted of full rank who were thus " born 
in the purple,^' the porphyrogenneti, so called from this 
stone and not, as often assumed, from the purple dye of 
robes. 



THE ROMAN STONE 12 1 

One need not accept these stories at their face value. 
They are repeated here only to remind us how unique a 
place the stone occupied in the thoughts and imaginations 
of men; in that regard it makes little difference whether 
the traditions had realities behind them or not. So, too, 
the human interest makes it worth while to repeat the 
following anecdote without inquiring what degree of 
authenticity it possesses: 

There is a large slab of porphyry at the entrance to 
St. Mark's Cathedral at Venice on which, so the tale 
runs, the German Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, 
Frederick Barbarossa, knelt when making his humiliating 
act of submission to Pope Alexander, in 1177, whose feet 
he kissed as they rested on the purple stone. In 
November, 1866, King Victor Emanuel visited Venice for 
the first time, and his attention was called to this slab 
by Cardinal Trevisanto, who for obvious reasons related 
the triumph of ecclesiastical over civil power. The King 
appreciated the situation but contented himself with turn- 
ing to the minister in attendance and remarking : ^^ Tempi 
passatij nicht wahr, lieber Baron? '^ 

One can find chips of porphyry in countless places in 
and near Rome; — at Hadrian's labyrinthian Villa, or in 
the rubbish-heaps of dusty little piazzas near forgotten 
churches on the Aventine; on the sites of villas or tombs 
in the wide Campagna where the plough has turned them 
up to be washed by the winter rains, or on the Quirinal 
Hill where an electric conduit is being laid; in the soil of 
cloistered gardens and in the flower-plot near the Pyramid 
of Cestius where one goes to visit the grave of Keats. 



12 2 ' G. M. WHICHER 

And it is always of tempi passati that the stone speaks, — 
the Past with its triumphs and its agonies, its tyrannies 
and its martyrdoms, its frantic passions and its long 
decay. It is indeed the Stone of Rome. 

G. M. WmcHER 



GREEK AND TEACHING 

TT THEN as an officer of Phi Beta Kappa, I came to 
▼ V examine the condition, requirements, standards 
and standing of Hunter College, to act on a petition for a 
chapter of this fraternity of higher learning, two facts 
were, I found, conspicuous, the number of its graduates 
who took up the beneficent and beneficial task of teaching, 
and the proportion of its undergraduates who took Greek. 
These twain do not always go together. There are those 
who teach teachers who take no thought of Greek and 
their daily tongue doth bewray them. Diction and scrip- 
tion together betray that they have never learned " what 
drink the vines of Greece produce.'^ When such come to 
lay out the work ^^ a new school they look on the classics 
as " a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle " and 
exclude them altogether. 

But not in Hunter. It is not necessary there, as in too 
many colleges and schools for women, to repeat Shelley's 
question, "Are there no Grecian virgins? " There are in- 
stead Grecians a-plenty, as is true of our great State 
Universities of the West. Once, in the presence of the 
president of one of these institutions, I proposed that 
Phi Beta Kappa should as in its earlier days require the 
classics for membership. " If we did that," said he, with 
prescient indignation, " we could not elect anybody but 

women to Phi Beta Kappa in University." 

123 



124 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

There too, as I knew, most of the women looked forward 
to teachmg and backward to Greek, well-learned, when 
they left the institution. 

Nothing is an accident. In learning the path closed is 
sought by the newcomer. Our recent immigration from 
Russia, where the path of higher learning was closed to 
the Jew, turned to college and university on arriving here 
and swarmed to callings long denied. So did the Irish 
eighty years ago when they came here from an island 
where college studies and universities were barred in a 
bigoted past by English laws. The same objection was 
made between 1840 and i860 that the Irish were over- 
crowding our institutions of learning, a complaint as falla- 
cious then as now and as certain then to disappear as now. 
No haunt of high study can ever be overcrowded by willing 
learners unless the ghosts of dead and disgraceful preju- 
dice haunt them. For the student there is always room. 

Greek and Latin have always been pursued, but not 
always overtaken by women, from the earliest days of the 
renaissance, but as these tongues ceased to be a lofty 
enthusiasm and became profitable for the life that now is 
and became open doors to various callings, they were elimi- 
nated from the teaching of women because idleness and 
feminine refinement were associated together and their 
minds were held to be unfitted for the tongues of the past 
and the tongues of the present were substituted. This ex- 
clusion was part of the servitude of women, and as we all 
know with feminine emancipation women turned first to 
joys denied, as has been the habit of human nature from 
the beginning of time. How perilous then are those who 



GREEK AND TEACHING 125 

multiply commandments and treat ethics as a doctrine of 
exclusions and think morals and morality can be increased 
by searching out forbiddals. On such lies heavy the ban 
and the curse of Freedom and of Righteousness. 

Women have thereof added much and many to the zeal 
and the number of those who seek first the kingdom of 
the ancient learning. Through them, to quote again the 
great Prophet and Advocate of Hellas, Shelley, " The 
Greeks expect a savior from the West." I know no one 
of the newly elected college presidents of the recent years 
who has presented so sound a work in the classic field as 
the freshly chosen head of Bryn Mawr College, — happy 
home of learning alike vigorous and liberal, — Miss 
Marion Edwards Park, to whom I rejoice to pay homage 
by the name and superscription under which I have had 
the honor of knowing her for over a score of years. This 
fortunate increase of the students of Greek and Latin is 
not, I regret to say, universal. It is less frequent from the 
" social life " type of women's colleges whither go those 
who seek '^ country club " ideals in their collegiate 
ambitions. 

In co-educational colleges, this new group who follow in 
the steps of Erasmus " the first Greek to touch the ^ Eng- 
lish ' strand " has had two misfortunate fruits. Men leave 
the studies women take. This strictly anthropological 
tendency, sign and mark also of our young barbarians at 
play, arises from another cause easily understood. Greek 
and Latin and " outside " activities do ill agree. Often 
they exist together, but the inevitable tendency is the 
other way. It is easier to follow the example of Greece in 



126 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

the Palaestrum than in the Academy^ and the fields of Elis 
are more tempting than the grove of Plato. There are cer- 
tain fundamental toils inseparable from a translation both 
happy, accurate and novel from Greek or Latin which do 
not attend glibly echoed opinions on English literature 
whose race can be run without a horse and its honors won 
without the toils of a lexicon and the measured weighing 
of words, aptly chosen. These various conditions and ob- 
stacles have their inevitable effect on young men who 
value their college letter above the best of all training for 
letters, and yearn for the thunder of the bleachers rather 
than the still small voice which has been heard by the 
streams of Greece. Nor will an examination of the cata- 
logues of our colleges show that the " records '' of athletics 
lead to life's leadership. Anyone who will take the 
trouble, as I have, to check off the members of Phi Beta 
Kappa in a single college, like my own, Amherst, will find 
that those who won this honor and led in after life far 
exceed those who won their "A." Such have their weight 
and influence in undergraduate days, a share succeed in 
after years, but the proportion is smaller than those who 
met the tests of scholarship, omitting, as is fair, those who 
in the former case were elected in after life. 

Wherever in women's colleges teaching is the frequent 
future goal, there the numbers multiply of those who " re- 
trace the Grecian cunning from its source," for Words- 
worth is one who cherished the fruits of his classic studies 
in Cambridge in which at St. Johns he distinguished him- 
self. 



GREEK AND TEACHING 127 

With decoration of ideal grace; 

A dignity, a smoothness Hke the works 

Of Grecian art and purest poesy. 

" I got into rather an idle way," he wrote later of his 
Cambridge days, " reading nothing but the classic authors 
and Italian poetry,'^ the direct descendant in the peninsu- 
lar verse accessible in his day of Vergil, Lucretius, Horace 
and Catullus. His ode on the '' Intimations of Immortal- 
ity," is itself a monument to his knowledge and close study 
of the Greek chorus. Without that, this could not have 
been. Reading his classics in this way, in his first year, 
free from the mathematical doom because he had already 
covered the Euclid and Algebra of the first year — most 
admirable example for the youth who wants to enjoy the 
full liberty of letters and reading in college — Wordsworth 
was the more awake to the perils of routine classical 
study: — 

In fine, 
I was a better judge of thoughts than words, 
Misled in estimating words, not only 
By common inexperience of youth, 
But by the trade in classic niceties, 
The dangerous craft of culling termane phrase 
From languages that want the living voice. 
To carry meaning to the natural heart; 
To tell us what is passion, what is truth, 
What reason, what simplicity and sense. 

Given teaching of a different order and study carried on 
as Wordsworth practised his reading of the classics in 
a leisured year, and it is easy to see why the living instincts 
of women and of teachers turn to ancient study. Lan- 



128 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

guage is the early field of woman as teacher-mother. Our 
natal accent, the rhythm of our speech, the fashion in 
which we enunciate those simple words that make the 
warp and woof of language on which we later embroider 
other patterns, are learned at a mother's knee. Happy 
the child whose mother in school and college days remem- 
bered this distant duty and schooled herself to the utter- 
ance of a perfected and perfecting English and expression. 
No later effort of the primary teacher can completely cor- 
rect the errors caught from a mother's knee ; but the one 
great, effective and universal national agency through 
which our 105,000,000 are saved from the opaque intrica- 
cies of dialects, not mutually understood, is the primary 
and grammar teachers. They have their lacks and failings, 
they have their slips and shortcomings, they are often 
feared by parents more desirous to preserve their social 
shibboleths than to have their children receive a rigorous 
democratic training; but none the less our teachers save 
us from the barriers of dialects that seam and divide all 
other lands and tongues. Thanks to our teachers, our con- 
tinental area has fewer obstacles and divisions of this 
order than civilized lands of a thirtieth of our area. 

Classical studies offer the best of all ways to see one's 
own language detached, to become versed in the bounda- 
ries and meanings of words and to feel, if one has patiently 
worked in Greek and Latin verse, the lilt and measure of 
English rhythm and meter. Every artist will tell you that 
you never really know a face, however familiar, until you 
draw or model it ; you never know your own tongue until 
you have hunted through it for the precise and gracious 



GREEK AND TEACHING 129 

words that fit Greek and Latin. If you go a step further 
and try, however lamely and in however scant a measure, 
to turn English verse into Latin or Greek, you find a new 
weapon in your hands. 

The teacher has to teach the ignorant. Nearly all the 
works on education and its theory seem to me to forget 
this primal fact. To teach, you must remove your own 
ignorance. No one person who does me the honor to read 
this, but will instantly remember how one's own paucity 
and poverty in English grew plain and grew plainer from 
the first Latin reader on to the ^'Agamemnon." At every 
step and stage, you are sounding your own ignorance, 
your want of knowledge of words and your comprehen- 
sion of them. If you have a serious discourse to deliver, 
nothing stirs your well of English, more or less pure as 
you have guarded it, and gives new words than a span, 
even brief, of two or three hours' translation from a 
classic tongue. These be facts. 

They are not to be answered by genius which lacks 
classic knowledge. The wind of genius blows where it 
listeth. No man can guide it. Even Lincoln gained from 
reading in translation Homer's " IHad." He knew our 
great classic which rests on Greek and Latin foundations, 
King James' Bible, almost by heart. But I am writing of 
the average, of the Not-Genius, who have no great gift 
of tongues given by the cloven flames of Pentecostal 
powers. It is those who have little of language who profit 
much and most by the classics. Our experience has 
already proved how perilous is the betrayal in our colleges, 
the House of its Friends, of classic culture. From Thana- 



130 MARGARET BARCLAY WILSON 

topsis to the death of Lowell we had some poet who was 
read by all the English-speaking world. Where is there 
such a poet now after forty years of the drying of the 
springs and rills of Greece? We had essayists and philo- 
sophic historians widely read by the English race. Who 
has to-day the vogue and authority of Emerson and of 
Motley outside our boundaries? They are gone and they 
will not return until the old studies of a distant day are 
again burning in the bush of our national education, giv- 
ing both life and light as our youth finds itself through 
these studies again on holy ground. 

Sense of beauty is the need of the teacher, next to an 
awakened, trained, vital sense of one's native tongue. If 
you wish to learn how atrophied is this latter sense, spend 
a few appalled hours in reading the theses that are turned 
out on " English " subjects in our universities from the 
Pacific to the Atlantic, a large share by those who have 
abandoned classical studies and lack their inspiration. 
The critical comprehension and response to beauty as such 
is the supreme need of the teacher. It is a greater need 
and a more inspiring influence than mere knowledge. 
Natural beauty is all about us. This great city which 
Hunter College so nobly serves, is never without natural 
beauty, seated as it is among flowing waters, half the area 
within its boundaries flashing to gulls' winging, knowing 
sun, moon and stars in its depths and the free winds that 
caress and smite the tides of the Atlantic as they rise 
daily on our shore. The school may reek with the radiator 
and unwashen childhood, " sewn up for the Winter," the 
street may be a daily proof that to those who give garbage, 



GREEK AND TEACHING 13 1 

garbage shall be given in abundant measure, the lowering 
houses may shadow thronged sidewalks sounding to all 
the dialects of Europe, but a step this way or that, and 
suddenly the surge of the Hudson fills the end of a street, 
or the churning waters of the East River surge at your 
feet, or some steep rise looks across houses to the distant 
blue of ocean. This, thank God, is always present with 
us. No child is born in this strange city of many marvels, 
of which the greatest of all is our low child death-rate, but 
has before long a breath of the damp sea, wreathing mist 
and fog, or looks on the might and mystery of moving 
waters. 

But though this exist sown with the plentiful hand of 
sea, winds, glacier, river, rock and tide, there is still 
needed that inner knowledge of beauty as a garment and 
perpetual possession of the mind. Buildings fall, statues 
disappear, paintings darken to mere shadows of their past, 
all the works of man save the written word, perish with 
the using. Of the " monuments of art " few there be and 
few be those that see them. To still fewer is the seeing 
eye and the trained perception. Much of my work and 
many of my days have been given to such criticism of 
art as the modern world of our cities permits. For fifty 
years, I have seen all that there has been to see on this 
side of the ocean and much on the other. My early 
memories are of the trenches dug in Nineveh and its monu- 
ments fill my earliest vision. Once at dusk, I looked up 
unexpected and unknowing at a great graven bull of 
Ashur-bani-pal with sudden terror, such as the primitive 
savage may have felt, and knew for the first time the 



132 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

strange hid-smile on the lips of this symbol of Nisroch. 
I have studied, I have seen, I have written. There are no 
galleries of American art in which I can walk without 
seeing scores of paintings and sculpture on which I wrote 
at their first appearing by artists whose careers I have, 
too often, alas ! seen from beginning to fruitful end in the 
forty-six years of my criticism. It lies buried in the 
illimitable, inaccessible files, I am not regretful to say; 
but I feel a sincere joy that in a city where I wrote 
for thirty-one consecutive years on the annual ex- 
hibition I had the overflowing reward of know- 
ing that however far I fell short, many artists 
felt I was the defender of the claims of art, the 
pleader for its supreme need in our American life, the in- 
terpreter and revealer of what they sought to do. But 
when I look back on this span of study, of patient devo- 
tion, of earnest desire rather to show where an artist was 
right than to prove him wrong, I am appalled at my early 
ignorance, of the labors that went to what little knowledge 
I have won, and how scant and short I am, after all these 
years given to the patient appreciation of the art of many 
lands. East and West, of any true and accurate compre- 
hension of this vast field of the beautiful which the most 
industrious and best travelled of Americans sees, after all, 
so little. 

But the written word abideth and changeth not, though 
art passeth and few with regardful eyes look thereon, to 
see the little that remaineth. " Let us now praise famous 
men and our fathers that begat us. Leaders of the people 
by their counsel, and by their knowledge of learning, meet 



GREEK AND TEACHING 133 

for the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions, such 
as recited verses in writing." These remain and pass not 
away. Behold they stand from everlasting to everlasting 
and their scrolls shall remain until the Heavens are 
rolled away like a scroll in an effectual fervent heat and 
man hath gone to his last home from the earth that shall 
know him no more, forever moving voiceless among the 
worlds that were and are not. 

For us all, the treasure and garner of man on this round 
threshing floor of earth, his feet have trod through the 
centuries, are the ancient letters of which I speak which 
give the teacher to hold in one's own hand and heart, 
forevermore, eternal beauty open to all, accessible for all, 
which passeth not away. If you sit but once to read but 
once a play heard but once in the Dionysiac theater, there 
remaineth for you a perpetual treasure of beauty. If 
the tender radiance and Roman majesty have shone but 
once on your path, you have lifted up a standard before 
your path for all your days. Some line from a chorus 
will come to you in a darkened moment and bring light. 
Some phrase, which has sunk into the subconscious mind, 
will guide your pen. Your lips will shape again some 
thought of consolation, some word of inspiration, beautiful 
for situation, the joy of a whole life, which Plato has given 
you. Whether it be the form over which you toiled, the 
precise utterance which you phrased again for yourself 
will elevate your use of your own tongue. The sense of 
beauty will crown your life, enrich your days and shed 
light on your path. These things are a new spring and a 
sure guide to the controlling sense of beauty. 



134 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

The choice which so many of the undergraduates of 
Hunter College have made for classic studies is justified 
by these things. Beauty and not knowledge is the saving 
grace of life. Without it knowledge is but heaviness and 
the increase of learning but despair that has no surcease. 
To science Dr. Wilson has given her life. Her labors 
have all been in this field, labors devoted alike to humanity 
and to education. Greek science itself began in this spirit. 
The little Greek island of Cos gave Hippocrates, and 
medicine had from him its first consciousness not alone 
of healing, but of growth and of nutriment, with all the 
radiating and related procesess of both. It chanced to 
me once, to come a stranger into Hunter College and 
blindly seeking my way to end seated in Dr. Wilson^s 
room. I did not know her name, nor did she mine, through 
the half hour in which we talked alone. In time I was 
found by an active messenger and speeded on my errand. 
I went on, I remember, feeling I had met an Attic spirit, 
for the spirit of Athens was not, as many mistake, contem- 
plative or vague or fanciful. The spirit of Athens was 
direct, practical, immediate. Beauty was a means and 
not an end. Philosophy was no search for the ultimate or 
probing of the infinite. It was a direct discussion of life 
as it was and thought as it showed itself in the daily 
ways, work and walk of men. The practical advance and 
progress of Athens as a place to live in guided the whole 
range of Greek literature. Homer recited his poems for the 
same reason movies exist to-day, because people wanted 
them. Every play we have was as directly related to cur- 
rent causes and affairs as a newspaper. None of Greek 



GREEK AND TEACHING 135 

eloquence was in its Attic days composed for '' leave to 
print." It was all as vital as a campaign speech. Wood- 
row Wilson, as his first preparation to lead the Nation, 
began by bringing, as he told me, the body of Demos- 
thenes to a point where he could read any page at sight, 
and his speeches are modelled on the great orator who 
shook the Arsenal and fulmined over Greece. 

Nor could Dr. Wilson's labors be better described than 
in the lines: 

The cry of the conscience of Life: 
Keep the young generations in hail 
And bequeath them no tumbled house. 

Talcott Williams 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 

MODERN psychology grew up in close relation to 
physiology. It was, in large measure, an offshoot 
of physiology. What we now call the " older " psychol- 
ogy, reaching down to the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, was more often called "mental philosophy," and 
properly so, since its associations were almost exclusively 
with philosophy. Few anticipated that psychology 
would ever find use for such a thing as a laboratory; and 
in fact few realized what a perishing need psychology 
had of more extensive data, and more precise data. But 
among the sense physiologists of the first half of the 
nineteenth century, there were quite a number whose ex- 
perimental researches took them into fields closely border- 
ing upon that of psychology. E. H. Weber, for one, 
after studying the cutaneous and muscular senses, and 
after noting, in particular, the peculiarity of sensory dis- 
crimination which was afterward to receive the name of 
" Weber's Law," ventured to call the attention of psy- 
chology to his methods and results, in the hope that they 
might prove interesting and suggestive. While it cannot 
be recorded that psychology immediately reverberated 
to this call from a sister science, to-day we honor Weber 
as the first definite precursor of experimental psychology. 
Weber's most direct successor was Fechner, a physicist 
by profession, but a peculiarly original and independent 

136 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 137 

investigator whose work was largely extra-professional. 
He took an extraordinary interest in Weber's law, and 
labored valiantly in devising experimental methods for 
putting that law to a rigid test, and in devising statistical 
methods for treating the data of his experiments. Later 
in life, he adapted these methods to the study of other 
psychological problems, especially those of experimental 
esthetics. He can well be named the first experimental 
psychologist. 

Helmholtz, a contemporary of Fechner, being a physi- 
ologist by profession and interest, can scarcely be claimed 
as a psychologist, but was certainly the greatest of the 
precursors of experimental psychology. His remarkably 
complete studies of the senses of sight and hearing carried 
him beyond the sense organs into problems such as those 
of space perception and tonal harmony. Also, he is dear 
to psychologists as the first to devise an experiment on 
reaction time. This he did with the purely physiolog- 
ical object of measuring the speed of conduction of the 
sensory nerves, but he was soon followed by the Dutch 
physiologist. Bonders, who extended this line of study to 
complex reactions, with the object of measuring the speed 
of the simplest mental operations; and when, soon after 
this, psychological laboratories began to appear, the re- 
action time experiment was taken over as a regular 
stand-by. 

This movement from physiology towards psychology 
took definite shape in the work of Wundt, who, starting 
as a physiologist, and serving for a time as Helmholtz's 
assistant — but also influenced very much by Fechner — 



138 R. S. WOODWORTH 

published in 1873 an extensive treatise with the surpris- 
ingly novel title of " Physiological Psychology," and in 
1879 established at the University of Leipzig a psycho- 
logical laboratory. Other similar laboratories were soon 
started in many universities, and not a few of them were 
manned by pupils of Wundt. 

But it would be going altogether too far to speak of 
modern psychology as entirely an offshoot of physiology. 
We must not overlook the continuity of interest from the 
older, pre-experimental days of mental philosophy down 
to the present. Nor must we overlook the influence of 
two other sciences besides physiology. Biology, when it 
came to study evolution, opened up a field as important 
on the mental side as on any other. Heredity and varia- 
tion, ontogeny and phylogeny, had a psychological aspect, 
and the great present interest in animal psychology, in 
child psychology, in mental heredity and in individual 
differences, can be traced back to Darwin, who must thus 
rank as one of the precursors of modern psychology. Gal- 
ton is the outstanding representative of the early psy- 
chological work along this general line. 

Nor must we overlook the influence of psychiatry upon 
psychology. Ever since Pinel, shortly before 1800, 
" struck the chains " from the insane in a Paris institu- 
tion, and demanded that they be treated and studied as 
human beings, the problems of abnormal mentality have 
formed a part of the task confronting the science of psy- 
chology, and the data of abnormal behavior have pro- 
vided an important section of the foundation upon which 
psychology is privileged to build. 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 139 

All in all, psychology can best be considered as an out- 
growth of biological science in the broadest sense, rather 
than from any single one of the biological sciences. Yet 
it remains true that the most decisive step in the creation 
of psychology as a natural science was the founding of 
psychological laboratories after the model of those exist- 
ing in physiology. 

The technique of psychological investigation was ac- 
cordingly derived in no small measure from physiology; 
and it may be worth while to ask just what, in the way of 
method, physiology did contribute. 

First of all, we must notice the great use psychology 
has found for physiological registering devices, such as 
were developed in the laboratories of Marey and Ludwig. 
The kymograph has been put to many uses. Muscle 
levers, ergographs, sphygmographs and pneumographs 
have been applied in the study of voluntary and involun- 
tary movements, emotions, etc. In certain directions, 
such as photographic registration of eye movements, psy- 
chologists have made notable contributions to the im- 
provement of the graphic method. Generally speaking, 
we may say that psychological technique for the study of 
muscular responses is an adaptation from physiology; and 
the same is true of technique for the study of secretory 
responses, so far as psychology has begun to experiment 
along this line. Up to the present time, comparatively 
little use has been made in the psychological laboratory 
of the technique of chemical physiology. 

But it was sense physiology that most directly supplied 
the psychological laboratory with a ready-made tech- 



140 R. S. WOODWORTH 

nique. The method of sense physiology consisted, first, 
in controlling the stimulus, and, second, in expert observa- 
tion of the sensation produced. For controlling the stim- 
ulus, sense physiology supplied color wheels, perimeters, 
standard tuning forks, resonators, olfactometers, touch 
hairs, and a whole battery of similar apparatus. 

The " expert observation of sensation " is what is 
known as " introspection "; and it may be rather shock- 
ing, to both physiologists and psychologists, to hear this 
much-discussed method spoken of as a heritage from the 
physiological laboratory. Do not the introspective psy- 
chologists acclaim introspection as the peculiar glory of 
psychology, and do not hard-headed natural scientists, 
including physiologists, look askance at psychology for its 
dependence on just this method? Further, was not psy- 
chology most " introspective " before its affiliation with 
physiology? 

In answer to this last question, we can say, "No, the 
older psychology was not based upon introspection in any 
strict sense." It was reflective rather than introspective. 
It was based on the same sort of reflective thinking that 
occurs whenever any question arises, for example in chem- 
istry, which one answers as best one can, in the light of 
past experience and general considerations, without re- 
course to any fresh observations. Introspection, on the 
other hand, is a form of direct observation, a means 
of gaining fresh empirical data, and as such it was ap- 
parently first practiced by the sense physiologists, as by 
Purkinje in observing entoptic phenomena, by Weber in 
observing temperature adaptation, by Helmholtz in ob- 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 141 

serving overtones, and by those who established the ex- 
istence of visual contrast and after-images, of beats and 
difference tones, and of a host of such " subjective sen- 
sations." 

The technique of such introspection consisted, first in 
securing the services of a trained and trustworthy ob- 
server and instructing him as to what sensation to watch 
for, next in presenting this observer with a carefully con- 
trolled stimulus, and finally in recording his testimony as 
to the sensations experienced. It is also necessary, of 
course, to check the testimony of the single observer by 
that of others, equally competent. This is the method 
of the introspective psychologists of the present day, who 
have endeavored, to be sure, to refine the method and to 
utilize it in problems that lie beyond the interests of 
sense physiology. 

If the method of the introspective wing of present-day 
psychology is thus derived from the sense physiologists, 
the ideal of the other extreme wing, the behavioristic, is 
to substitute for introspection minute records of the motor 
and secretory responses of the man or animal under ob- 
servation. Thus the distinctive behavioristic technique, 
no less than that of the introspectionists, originated in 
the physiological laboratory. 

It may fairly be said, however, that the center of the 
psychological attack, as distinguished from these extreme 
wings, is being carried forward by a technique which did 
not originate in the physiological laboratory, but was con- 
trived by psychology itself. It was derived by psychol- 
ogy from every-day experience and practice, rather than 



142 R. S. WOODWORTH 

from any antecedent science, Essentially, it consists in 
setting the subject of the experiment some task to be per- 
formed, and then in measuring the success with which the 
task is performed. The conditions are of course con- 
trolled, and they may be varied in order to compare the 
performance under different conditions and thus to throw 
some light on the inner mechanism by which the task is 
performed. Experiments of this sort go back, in some 
slight measure, to the astronomers with their study of the 
" personal equation," and to the reaction time work of 
Helmholtz and Bonders. But they go back, more partic- 
ularly, to Fechner's measurements of ability to distinguish 
weights and other magnitudes, to Galton's beginnings in 
the way of psychological tests, to Ebbinghaus's experi- 
ments on memory, to Bryan and Barter's work on the 
effects of practice, to Thorndike's experiments on the 
learning of animals. All mental tests come under this 
general method, as do many laboratory experiments that 
do not belong properly under the head of tests. 

We should mention, in passing, that some of the tech- 
nical procedures employed in psychological investigation 
have been derived also from biology and from psychiatry. 
From biology, more specifically from biometry, have 
come statistical methods that are of extraordinary use in 
psychology. Dealing with extremely variable phenomena, 
psychology has great need of statistics. From psychiatry 
has come the method of hypnosis, which has been applied 
by the psychopathologists, especially, for the obtaining of 
psychological data; and from psychiatry, also, has come 
psycho-analysis, which, considered in a broad sense as 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 143 

a means of obtaining an intimate case history of the indi- 
vidual, should be a source of important data. 

It is an interesting question, in view of the close re- 
lationship between physiology and psychology, whether 
any definition can be framed that shall sharply distinguish 
them, so as to assign to each a separate field of work. 

One distinction which has been attempted is to the 
effect that physiology, like physics and chemistry and 
botany, is concerned with certain parts of the physical 
world, whereas psychology is concerned with an inner 
world of consciousness. It would take us too far afield to 
make plain the logical difficulties that inhere in this seem- 
ingly clean-cut distinction; and it will suffice to point 
out that this line of cleavage, if it could be drawn, would 
leave the sense physiologists, in much of their work, 
on the psychological side of the boundary, and the behav- 
ioristic psychologists on the physiological side; in other 
words, it would not square with the actual or historical 
division between the two sciences. 

A more obvious distinction which readily suggests itself 
is that physiology is concerned with the bodily activities of 
the organism, and psychology with its mental activities. 
Mental activities, if this is to be a real distinction, must 
be entirely non-bodily. But do we know of any activ- 
ities of the organism that are performed without the use 
of sense organ, muscle, gland or nervous system? If not, 
psychology is left without any field, and exists only by 
sufferance, until physiology has time to catch up with its 
work. But we can turn this argument the other way 
around, just as logically, if not quite so convincingly. If 



144 ^- S. WOODWORTH 

the physiologist should observe bodily activities, not 
under anesthesia or decerebration, but in the intact and 
fully active subject, he would find — he has found — 
that secretion, digestion, metabolism, circulation, are very 
much involved with activities which any one would call 
mental — with emotions, efforts, hopes, fears, distractions 
and mental work. In the end, he might come to doubt 
whether there were any bodily activity that was not at 
the same time mental, and whether physiology was not a 
temporary stop-gap against the time when psychology 
should rise to its responsibilities. 

Another distinction would be to recognize the probabil- 
ity that any mental activity is at the same time bodily, 
and that any bodily activity of the intact organism runs 
at least a good chance of being mental as well — and 
then simply to say that physiology considers any or all 
of these activities as bodily activities, and psychology as 
mental activities. To make this more than a mere verbal 
distinction, we must substitute more definite terms in 
place of " bodily '' and " mental.'' We might say that 
physiology is concerned with analyzing the activities of 
the organism into activities of its several organs, whereas 
psychology is concerned with these same activities when 
the organism is viewed as a whole. Thus, physiology 
would be concerned with hearing as a function of the ear 
and its neural apparatus, while psychology would be con- 
cerned with sensations of sound and reactions to sound, 
without reference to the organs involved. Physiology 
would examine the workings of the brain in perception 
and memory, while the data that psychology has accumu- 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 145 

lated on these processes would not be affected even if, 
contrary to all probability, it should some day be dis- 
covered that the brain functioned simply as a big endo- 
crine gland. 

In a broad way, this last distinction certainly fits the 
actual work of the two sciences fairly well. It is very 
much the same as saying that physiology is concerned 
with intraorganic life, and psychology with the life of 
relation. When physiologists raise the cry, as they do 
from time to time, that their science should consider the 
animal as a whole, and not simply as made up of separate 
organs, what they are apt to mean is that the interaction 
of the different organs and parts of the animal's body 
should be studied. This is a matter which would fall to 
physiology and not to psychology, under the proposed 
distinction. Psychology could almost afford to ignore the 
existence of organs. 

The distinction which makes physiology a study of 
organs and their interrelations, and psychology the study 
of the organism in its external relations, would, how- 
ever, seem to break down here and there. In a metab- 
olism experiment, where total body weight is correlated 
with temperature, or where nitrogen output is cor- 
related with food administered, no account may be 
taken of the organs, but the activities of the whole organ- 
ism are considered in relation to certain environmental 
facts. Yet no one would think of calling this psychology. 
Also, it is in strictness impossible to consider intraorganic 
life without any reference to environmental stimuli. Per- 
haps the best that we can do is to make a rather hybrid 



146 TALCOTT WILLIAMS 

definition, somewhat as follows. The situation that has 
given rise to physiology is the existence of an organism 
which (i) is made up of various organs, and (2) shows 
certain fundamental adaptations to the world, such 
as metabolism, sensitivity and motility. Physiology, re- 
sponding to the problems thus set before the inquiring 
mind, accepts the obligation of determining the function 
of each of these organs, and the mechanism of each of 
these fundamental adaptations. Psychology, on the 
other hand, is a response of the inquiring mind to 
the existence of an organism showing an active life of 
relation, involving especially certain adaptations, such 
as learning, thinking and feeling, that seem less funda- 
mental than metabolism, sensitivity and motility, less 
closely related to the elementary physical and chemical 
processes that go on in the body, and less easily analyzed 
into the functions of different organs. Consequently, 
psychology has gone a different way from physiology, 
accumulating data on the response of the organism to 
various stimuli, and not bothering itself much about the 
particular organs involved. 

Such a distinction would not make either of the two 
sciences less worthy or necessary than the other, even 
though it would seem to make physiology the more funda- 
mental. Cellular physiology is more fundamental than 
organ physiology, and yet organ physiology is just as 
necessary as it was before the development of cellular 
physiology. In the same way, the great development of 
histology has not laid gross anatomy on the shelf. Look- 
ing through a microscope, you could never see the heart 



PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY 147 

nor the heart-beat. In the same way, physiology may, in 
a sense, be more fundamental than psychology, but it 
will never do the particular work of psychology. There 
is room enough for both. 

Much more important than delimiting the provinces 
of physiology and psychology is the work of keeping the 
two sciences in close relation with each other, and such a 
subject as " physiological psychology," though something 
of a mongrel, is well worth cultivating. The value of such 
mediating sciences has been abundantly proved in other 
cases, such as physical chemistry, or chemical physiology. 
Curiously enough, psychology is sometimes very sharply 
warned to keep its skirts clear of any contamination with 
physiology. And, curiously again, it has recently been a 
branch of medicine, psychiatry, that has issued this warn- 
ing to psychology. Usually, the complaint of medicine 
regarding psychology has been to the effect that it was 
not physiological enough; but here we have a branch of 
medical science complaining of the " materialistic tend- 
ency " of psychology. Of course, one recognizes that 
psychiatry has had its own internal conflict between the 
" somaticists " and those who found little profit in neural 
anatomy and physiology, and that the above complaint 
regarding psychology comes from the " psychic " wing of 
psychiatry. And of course also — what is more to the 
point — one realizes that psychologists often make rather 
amateurish use of physiology, for lack of sufficient knowl- 
edge of the subject. But, ideally, only good can come 
from bringing together knowledge from the two fields. 
The behavior of the organism as a whole should be related 



148 R. S. WOODWORTH 

to intraorganic processes. The content of physiological 
psychology must be an opportunistic matter, determined 
from time to time by the facts that admit of being 
brought into fruitful relation. At present, there are three 
chapters in physiology that are of special significance to 
psychology: those on the senses, on the nervous system, 
and on internal secretion. 

R. S. WoODWORTH 



INDEX 



Abbe, Robert, 1-3 

Agriculture, U. S. Department of, 19, 
20 

American Coal-tar Chemical Indus- 
try, 4-1 1 

Angell, James B., 36 

Antoninus Pius, 112, 115 

Attendance, Bureau of, 40 

Bell, Alexander Graham, 58, 59 

Benedict, 70 

Billings, Dr. John S., 26 

Blackwell, Dr. Elizabeth, 24, 30, 33, 

37 
Blackwell, Dr. Emily, 34 
Breithut, Frederick E., 4-1 1 
Brown Mouse, The, 76, 87 

Capen, S. P., 12-21 

Census, Board of Permanent, 40 

Chadwick, Dr. James R., 31 

Charlemagne, 59 

Character, 2 

Character and Education, 1-3 

Chemists, 5 

Child Labor, 44 

Child Welfare, 40, 45, 40 

Children's Bureau, 20 

Children's Court, New York, 45 

Chittenden, Professor Russell H., 65, 

73 
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 22, 104 
Coal, s 
Coal-tar, 4 

Compulsory Education, 43 
Compulsory Education Law, 45 
Compulsory Education, Bureau of, 40, 

46 



Compulsory Education in New York 

City, 40-46 
Cone, Helen Gray, 22-23 
Congress, 13, 14 
Conklin, Edwin G., S4 
Constitution, United States, 12 
Constructive Ethics of the New Era, 

or the Role of Science in Social 

Reconstruction, 88-96 
Corn bread, 65 

Daniel, Annie Sturges, 24-39 
Davis, John W., 40-46 
Dawson, Edgar, 47-55 
Disarmament Congress, 64 
Donders, 137 
DuBois, 70 
Dyes, 4 

Education, 12, 13, 14, 49, 60, 63, 75, 

82, 83, 84, 129 
Education, Articles on 

Character and Education, 1-3 
Compulsory Education in New 

York City, 40-46 
An Epistle in June, 22-23 
Federal Organization for Education, 

12-21 
Juvenal on Education, 97-103 
Medical Education of Women in 

the United States, 24-39 
A Postcript, 75-87 
Schools and Teachers, 56-63 
Social and Other Studies, 47-55 
Greek and Teaching, 123-135 
Education, Board of, New York City, 

40 
Education, U. S. Bureau of, 13, 14, 16 



149 



150 



INDEX 



Education, U. S. Department of, i6 
Education, Medical, 24-39 
Education, Roman, 97-103 
Education, Rural, 85- 
Eliot, President, 2 
Epictetus, 2 

Epistle in June, An, 22-23 
Erasmus, 125 

Fechner, 136 

Federal Organization for Education, 

12-21 
Food psychology, 66 
Food Situation in 1918, Memories of, 

64-74 
Franklin, Benjamin, 62 



Land ownership, 83 

Latifundia, 85 

Lexism, 88 

Lincoln, 129 

Lusk, Graham, 64-74 

Lusk's coefficients, 69 

Mann, Horace, 76 

Medical Education of Women in the 

United States, 24-39 
Memories of the Food Situation in 

1918, 64-74 
Mercury, 58 
Middleton, W. H., 104 
Ministry of Food, British, 67 
Mozans, H. J., 28 



Gibbons, Cardinal, 29 

Greek and Teaching, 123-135 

Green, Dr. William Henry, 62 

Harding, President, i 

Hardy, Professor W. B., 68 

Helmholtz, 137 

Henry, Joseph, 58 

Hitchcock, Dr. Charles H., 63 

Hodge, Dr. Charles W., 62 

HoUand, W. J., 56-63 

Hopkins, Professor Gowland, 67 

Hoover, Herbert, 73 

Hospitals, 26 

Hunt, Harriet K., 31 

Hunter College, 123 

Interallied Scientific Food Commis- 
sion, 65, 69, 71, 72, 73 
Interior, U. S. Department of, 3, 13 

Jacobi, Dr. Mary Putnam, 24, 27, 

37 
Jordan, Dr. David Starr, 78 
Juvenal, Decius Junius, 97 
Juvenal on Education, 97-103 



National Education Association, 47 

Natural law, 92 

Nature, 58 

Neesima, 61 

New York City, Compulsory Edu- 
cation in, 40 

New York Infirmary for Women and 
Children, 33 

Nutritive coefficients, 69, 70 

Osier, Dr. William, 35 

Parks, President Marion Edwards, 125 

Pasteur, 2 

Paton, Professor Noel, 68 

Phi Beta Kappa, 123, 126 

Physiology and Psychology, 136-148 

Piltdown skull, 57 

Pliny, 106 

Porphyry, 104 

Porter, Mary W., 116 

Postcript, A., 75-87 

Psychology, 136-148 

PuUen, H. W., 105 

Putnam, Dr. Mary, See Jacobi 



LaFarge, John, 2 
Lanciani, R., 106 



Quick, Herbert, 75-87 
Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 97 



INDEX 



iSi 



Radio, 59 

Red porphyry, 104 

Reed, Charles A. L., 88-96 

Roman education, 97 

Royal Society, London, 67, 68 

Rozier, 115 

Savages, 57, 58 

Schneider, Oskar, no, 113, 115, 
School Census, 40, 41, 42, 46 
Schools and teachers, 56-63 
Science in social reconstruction, 

of, 88 
Seelye, Julius Hawley, 63 
Service, 88 
Shakespeare, 23 
Smiles, Samuel, 2 
Smith, Dr. Stephen, 30 
Smith-Woodward, Dr. Arthur, 
Social and other studies, 47-55 
Social reconstruction, 88 
Social studies, 47 
Social Studies, National Council 

52 
Solomon, 59 



Stone, The Roman, 104-122 
Suetonius, 104 



Tanzer, Helen H., 97-103 

Teacher, i, 50, 56, 59, 60, 63, 128, 130 

Telephone, 59 

Truant children, 43, 44 

United States, 4, 12, 65, 67 
120 

Vasari, 118 

Vocational guidance, 45 
Role 

Weber, E. H., 136 

Weber's Law, 136 

Weigall, 109 

Welch, Dr WUliam H., 37 

Wheat, 65 

Whicher, G. M., 104-122 
57 Wilkinson, 115, 116 

Williams, Talcott, 123-135 

Wilson, Dr. Margaret B., 66, 134, 135 

Woodworth, R. S., 136-148 
for, Wordsworth, 126, 127 

World War, The, 4, 31, 64 

Wundt, 137 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

List of Subscribers and Cooperating Dedicators . . ix 

Character and Education i 

By Robert Abbe, M.D., Surgeon to St. Luke's Hos- 
pital, New York City, and New York Cancer Hospital 

American Coal-Tar Chemical Industry 4 

By Frederick E. Breithut, Ph.D., Assistant Profes- 
sor of Chemistry y College of the City of New York 

The Federal Organization for Education 12 

By Samuel P. Capen, Ph.D., Director, American 
Council on Education, Washington, D. C; Chan- 
cellor of the University of Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. 

An Epistle in June 22 

By Helen Gray Cone, Litt.D., Professor of English 
Language and Literature, Hunter College, New York. 

The Medical Education of Women in the United 

States 24 

By Annie Sturges Daniel, M.D., Physician in charge. 
Tenement House Service, New York Infirmary for 
Women and Children. 

Compulsory Education in New York City 40 

By John W. Davis, Director, Bureau of Attendance, 
Board of Education, City of New York. 

Social and Other Studies 47 "j^ 

By Edgar Dawson, Ph.D., Professor of History and 
Social Science, Hunter College, New York. 

Schools and Teachers S6'^^-_ 

By William J. Holland, LL.D., Director, Car?iegie 
Museum, Pittsburgh, Pa. 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 



Memories of the Food Situation in 191 8 64 

By Graham Lusk, Ph.D., Sc.D.^ F.R.S. (Edin.), 
Professor of Physiology, Cornell University Medical 
College, New York City. 

A Postscript (To the Brown Mouse) 75 

By Herbert Quick, Sociologist and Novelist. 

Constructive Ethics of the New Era, or The Role 

of Science in Social Reconstruction 88 

By Charles A. L. Reed, A.M., M.D., Professor 
Emeritus, Medical Faculty, University of Cincinnati; 
Consultant to the Cincinnati General Hospital; former 
President of the American Medical Association; Fel- 
low, American College of Surgeons; etc., 

Juvenal on Education 97 

By Helen H. Tanzer, Assistant Professor of Classics, 

Hunter College, New York. 

The Roman Stone (Red Porphyry) 104 

By George M. Whicher, Litt.D., Professor of Latin 
and Greek, Hunter College, New York. 

Greek and Teaching 123 

By Talcott Williams, L.H.D., LL.D., Litt.D., Emeri- 
tus Professor of Journalism, Columbia University. 

Physiology and Psychology 136 

By Robert Sessions Woodworth, Ph.D., Professor 
of Psychology, Columbia University. 

Index 149 



page >^^ 



i. 



SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS 



Robert Abbe, New York City 
Charles R. Abbott, New York City 
Edith Mulhall Achilles, 

New York City 
Sarah I. Acker, New York City 
Martha Abler, New York City . 
Ida Behm Amis, New York City 
Ernest H. Anthes, New York City 
Mrs. C. M. Ashton, 

Washington, D. C. 
Annie M. Atkinson, New York City 
Helen Baldwin, New York City 
L. C. Ball, New York City 
Florence Davey Banks, 

Hoboken, N. J. 
Julia E. Barnard, Glenbrook, Conn. 
Grace M. Bates, New York City 
Loxns A. Bauer, Washington, D. C. 
Elizabeth R. Beckwith, 

Stissing, N. Y. 
Mrs. E. L. Berg, New York City 
James Bertram, New Rochelle, N. Y. 
Mrs. James Bertram, 

New Rochelle, N. Y. 
Anna J. Bickel, New York City 
Charles Bolduan, 

American Consulate, Bremen 
Isabel Magner Bollenbach, 

New York City 
Clara A. Bourke, New York City 
Magdalen Brandt, New York City 
Helen Braun, New York City 
F. E. Breithut, New York City 
Claire Brenner, New York City 
Nancy Jane Brenner, 

New York City 
Anna W. Brenzinger, New York City 



Mrs. N. L. Britton, 

New York City 
Mary G. Brophy, New York City 
Elmer E. Brown, New York City 
Helen C. Brown, New York City 
Louisa Bruckman, New York City 
Louise Bruckner, New York City 
A. Bruderhausen, New York City 
Mae Speyer Bry, New York City 
E. S. Burgess, New York City 
Anne Elizabeth Bltilingame, 

New York City 
Amelia J. Burr, Englewood, N. J. 
Jessie C. Bush, New York City 
A. BussE, New York City 
S. P. Capen, Washington, D. C. 
Rufina a. Carls, New York City 
Mrs. Carnegie, New York City 
Wm. H. Carpenter, New York City 
Catherine R. Cassell, 

New York City 
Julia R. S. Chellborg, 

New York City 
Josephine Chevalier, 

East Orange, N. J. 
Ruth Christie, New York City 
S. H. Church, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
Celestina Ciervo, New York City 
L. D. CoFFMAN, Minneapolis, Minn, 
Bessie B. Cohen, New York City 
Bird S. Coler, New York City 
Helen G. Coles, New York City 
Marie Bell Coles, New York City 
Frances E. Coloraffi, 

New York City 
Columbia University Library, 

New York City 



X SUBSCRIBERS AND COOPERATING DEDICATORS 



Helen Gray Cone, New York City 
Jean Conklin, New York City 
Royal S. Copeland, New York City 
Luther M. Corn^'all, 

Washington, D. C. 
Antoinette Cosentino, 

New York City 
John Crerar Library, Chicago, 111. 
Mabel Weis Crdsius, 

West Linn, Oregon 
R. W. Curtis, New York City 
R. Fulton Cutting, New York City 
Blanche Brine Daly, 

Cambridge, Mass. 
Annie S. Daniel, New York City 
Frances L. Davidson, 

Weehawken, N. J. 
Frida Davidson, New York City 
Mary E. S. Davidson, 

Weehawken, N. J, 
Ethel wyn L. Davis, New York City 
John W. DA\as, New York City 
Mrs. John W. DA\r[s, 

New York City 
Edgar Dawson, New York City 
Lucie P. Dayton, New York City 
Agnes Deegan, New York City 
Frederic S. Dennis, New York City 
Edward Di Carlo, New York City 
Amy Wood all Dochtermann, 

New York City 
Mabel S. Douglass, 

New Brunswick, N. J. 
Anita M. Earl, New York City 
Bertha Eletz, New York City 
Charles H. Elliott, 

New Brunswick, N. J. 
Mrs. Maxwell Hall Elliott, 

New York City 
Mrs. Benedict Erstein, 

New York City 
Wm. L. Estabrooke, New York City 
Charles P. FAGNAN^, New York City 
Sarah B. Fazstnting, New York City 
Mary E. Finkelstein, 

New York City 



John H. Finley, New York City 
Patrick F. FitzGerald, 

New York City 
Lillian F. Flannery, 

Washington, D. C. 
Harriet D, Flaum, New York City 
Henry T. Fleck, New York City 
Emily G. Fletcher, New York City 
Pastoriza Flores, New York City 
Mary Fogarty, New York City 
Rose Frank, New York City 
Edna Rramer Franklin, 

New York City 
R. A. Franks, New York City 
Robert S. Freedman, 

New York City 
EIate Freeman, New York City 
L. H. Friedburg, New York City 
Frances E. Friedman, 

New York City 
Nettie Friedman, New York City 
Charlotte L. Friess, 

New York City 
Ethel L. Fritz, New York City 
Antonia H. Froendt, 

New York City 
Caroline Morris Galt, 

So. Hadley, Mass. 
Charlotte Garnt:r, New York City 
Josephine L. Garry, 

New York City 
Agnes Peterson Gar\tn, 

New York City 
Beatrice Gellert, New York City 
Anna Gertrude Gilbert, 

New York City 
Walter M. Gilbert, 

Washington, D. C. 
Rose L. Goldberg, New York City 
Bertha L. Goldman, 

New York City 
Sarah Goldstein, New York City 
Claudine Gray, New York City 
Nancy S. Greenfield, 

New York City 
Elizabeth Gregg, New York City 



